Important Holiday Donations
 
 

 
CHRISTMAS IS COMING - DONATING ITEMS OR MONEY... WHICH GROUP?
 
A TIMELY REMINDER BEFORE YOUR GENEROUS SPIRITS OPEN YOUR WALLETS.
 
Instead, give to any of the following 
GO "GREEN" AND
PUT YOUR MONEY WHERE IT WILL DO SOME GOOD:
 
Please share this with everyone you can.

I always liked the Salvation Army. Very good post and very eye opening on how our warm and fuzzy feelings about donating time and money may only be a giant placebo.

Awesome and much needed thread... you have listed some of my favorite charities..     awesome job!

I may have jumped the gun, it turns out this email is a decades old chain email that usually makes it's way around the series of tubes this time of year. While the information in the email is mostly outdated or completely false / misleading, it led me to actually look into many of the claims one by one and it pretty much confirmed what @"727Sky" was trying to say: BEWARE OF CHARITY!

Not all charity of course, but just beware of misleading / mismanaged charities. So here's a good snopes.com article on this email for starters:

Email Chain

Check that link out to see the numbers behind the numbers in the email. Some of the people haven't worked at these places in over a decade. Some of the charities that show "no salary" collected are mis-leading at best. 

With that said, let's get to the real numbers (again, which don't bode well for many of the names pointed out in the OP)

American Red Cross:

Quote:Financial Performance Metrics

 
Program Expenses
(Percent of the charity’s total expenses spent on the programs 
and services it delivers)
90.1%
 
Administrative Expenses
3.8%
 
Fundraising Expenses
5.9%
 
Fundraising Efficiency
$0.21
 
Working Capital Ratio (years)
0.25
 
Program Expenses Growth
-5.1%
 
Liabilities to Assets
54.2%

They actually didn't do that bad. When you see the number for just salaries paid, it made me sick. But then to see what they took in for donations it sort of softened the blow. (note - Fundraising efficiency above is defined as the amount of money they spent to raise 1 dollar). 

American Red Cross (Fiscal Year 2015):

Quote:REVENUE
 
Contributions
 
Contributions, Gifts & Grants
$518,028,857

Federated Campaigns
$76,917,491

Membership Dues
$0
   
Fundraising Events
$18,898,811
   
Related Organizations
$0
   
Government Grants
$46,190,500

Total Contributions
$660,035,659
   
Program Service Revenue
$1,925,059,348

Total Primary Revenue
$2,585,095,007
   
Other Revenue
$141,577,612

TOTAL REVENUE
$2,726,672,619
 
 
EXPENSES
 
Program Expenses
$2,587,035,899
   
Administrative Expenses
$118,033,560
   
Fundraising Expenses
$180,933,909

TOTAL FUNCTIONAL EXPENSES
$2,886,003,368
 
 
Payments to Affiliates
$0

Excess (or Deficit) for the year
$-159,330,749
 
 
Net Assets
$1,593,810,329

So yeah, they spent 118 million dollars paying people who work for them, but when you pull in 2.5 billion dollars we're looking at what, 4%? The cool part about this site is that you can check out a charity and at the bottom of the page for each charity is a comparison to other charities that do the same type of work. So if you plug in a veterans charity and see that it only got a 70% of something, the bottom of the page will list charities that rated higher who do the same work. Pretty neat tool when you are parting ways with money for good intentions. 

Another in the list was March of Dimes. They didn't score high at all and spend (in my humble opinion) TOO MUCH MONEY on fundraising and yeah, that's my opinion. But here are the numbers:

Quote:Overall Score & Rating 71.76  Financial 60.18  Accountability & Transparency 97.00

 
They got a "1 start" rating for financials...

Quote:Financial Performance Metrics

 
Program Expenses
(Percent of the charity’s total expenses spent on the programs 
and services it delivers)
66.5%
 
Administrative Expenses
11.0%
 
Fundraising Expenses
22.4%
 
Fundraising Efficiency
$0.25
 
Working Capital Ratio (years)
< 0.01
 
Program Expenses Growth
1.0%
 
Liabilities to Assets
88.1%

33% of their money goes towards fundraising and administrative cost. Not good at all if you ask me. Here are a few charities that do similar work:

Quote:Charities Performing Similar Types of Work

Highly Rated
Charity Name & State
Overall Score
Overall Rating
March of Dimes (NY)
71.76

Prader-Willi Syndrome Association (USA) (FL)
86.40

Alpha-1 Foundation (FL)
94.30

Fanconi Anemia Research Fund (OR)
86.44

Cerebral Palsy, Inc. (WI)
87.81

The moral of my long-winded story (sorry about that) is I've been burned by chain emails too many times to count. But each and every time something good came out of it: I learned more about the subject those emails were touching on (good, bad, and plenty of ugly). So while this email has very good intentions, I don't want anybody blowing an organization off before looking into it further. And both the OP and the site I was reading have opened my eyes quite a bit to the brilliance of marketing and sad reality of cronyism. And this site right here is great for that very weeding out that very thing:
Charity Navigator
Type in your charity, check out the numbers, COMPARE IT TO OTHERS, and make your very generous money and warm & fuzzy feelings go even further. 
DFC

(12-02-2016, 11:47 AM)DuckforcoveR Wrote: I always liked the Salvation Army. Very good post and very eye opening on how our warm and fuzzy feelings about donating time and money may only be a giant placebo.

The Sally Ann is always my choice. Only Church in the World that operates at a loss as far as I know.

My thoughts are to donate locally. Keep it in town as there are a lot of people in our own towns/cities that are in need and you have more of a connection in knowing the people you help and those that are out there supporting.

Just my 2 pennies.

Jude

@"Jude" it's worth much more than 2 pennies. I agree completely with that. Even some of the "national" charities mentioned above have local chapters that are phenomenal. But if it's kept local it really makes a difference in the community.

Is why put my money into my annual new years drinking binge fund ........  after all ..... charity begin at home ...... hence am my own charity ......