I think some of us are painting "national" charities with a pretty broad brush. Some are quite good.
When you give money to a charity, some of it probably goes to raise more money. This is a valid use of your money. If you give $100 to a charity to, for example, feed homeless people, that's nice. Maybe you just bought 50 meals. Nice. But what if they took $90 of your dollars and bought 45 meals and then used the other $10 of your money to mail out 30 letters that, on average, will bring in $10 each? That means they'll get $300 more or 150 more meals. Now, your $100 bought 195 meals. Taking $10 of your contribution and using it to raise more contributions was a very wise and very good use of your money.
When you give money to a charity, some of it goes to "overhead." Charities have electric bills and phone bills to be paid. Charities have offices that need furniture and equipment. And charities employ professional people. Some of those people and some of that equipment may be directly involved in the mission of the charity. For example, the cook who makes the meals at the aforementioned example charity. Part of the $2 per meal is his salary. That charity probably bought a commercial oven, walk-in refrigerators, and a commercial dish washer. The costs of that equipment is amortized over their expected life and rolled into that $2 too. So, the $2 per meal may break down as 50 cents for salaries and benefits for employees, ten cents for amortized cost of durable equipment, ten cents for operations (electricity, water, etc.), twenty cents for materials (napkins, paper cups, etc.), and $1.10 for the food. We can't deliver the $1.10 worth of food without incuring the 90 cents worth of overhead. So, those 90 cents are part of the mission cost.
Some of the personel and equipment are used in the fund-raising operation. Plus, fund raising may require telephoning, printing, mailing, etc. So, those costs are all part of that $10 we skimmed off of your $100 donation.
But there's always some administrative costs and overheads left. Our hypothetical soup kitchen, for example, might have an accountant who sees to it that the bills are all paid and the payroll is made and that all the books are all in order. Once a year, they hire an outside accountant who comes in and reviews those books. These costs must also be covered by a small fraction of the donations.
The key word here is SMALL. The challenge for a charity administrator who really does care about the mission of his charity is to see how small he can keep the adminsitrative overhead and how affective he can make the fund-raising operation. If your fundraising operation is affective and your overhead is low, then you'll have lots of money for your mission.
That's my problem right now. Our fund raising has not been as very affective this year and our overhead is about to go up.
Unfortunately, many charities -- national AND local -- don't do a good job of this.
if you want to donate to a charity, and I really think you should, then you need to do your homework and find a charity with a mission that appeals to you that is well run.
And if you can't find one, sent your money to St. Paul School, please...
The problems with a bf.c fund raiser are:
1) bf.c is not a registered charity. So, donations to our fund-raiser would not be tax-deductible. It's not hard to become a registered charity, but I doubt that Spark wants to hassle with it. Personally, I don't like to see people give money to charities without deducting it. Why? Because depending on your tax situation, for most people deducting is like getting about 30% of your money back at the end of the year. This means that you can give 30% more. The IRS is essentially giving a matching contribution. It's free money and I don't like leaving it on the table. The Federal Goverment is one of the least efficient charities out there. It's a good thing to take money from the Fed and give it to private charities that can use it more efficiently. Fortunately, we finally have a President that understands this.
2) Deciding which cause to support. That's gonna be a huge mess that I certainly don't want to get involved with.
So, while I applaud the idea, I don't think it's practical. I think everyone should find a charity, local or national, but preferably St. Paul Lutheran School of Sherwood, Oregon, and send your contributions.
