Think Before You Donate! (or Post)

***UPDATE: As we are heading into “giving season” I thought it would be good to re-publish this as a reminder. I have not looked anything up again for 2020, but I would imagine that nothing has changed very much.

***

Let me be clear. There is A LOT of research involved in this post. Way more than I care to admit. I do not expect anyone to fall so deeply down this rabbit hole as I did. That is why I am writing this post. I did the work for you, all you have to do is learn from it, and hopefully think a little more about these things both when posting memes and when choosing to donate to charity.

Below is the image that led me to research all this charity stuff. I’m sure you have probably seen it before. I’ve seen it in years past and took it at face value without really thinking much about it. In fact, it made me rethink how much I wanted to be donating to Goodwill. However, I have been looking at all memes like this much more critically lately, and this one was no exception.

Here is a convenient list of all charities listed with links to my write up about them:American Red Cross March of Dimes United Way UNICEF Goodwill Salvation Army American Legion Veterans of Foreign Wars Disabled American Veterans Military Order of the Purple Hearts Vietnam Veterans Associaton Make A Wish St. Jude Research Hospital Ronald McDonald Houses Lions Club International

I will do my best to address ALL of the charities listed in this image. It is easier to find information about some than it is others, and some of them left me with some big questions unanswered. However, across the board, there are four things that I think that should be addressed first.

1. NO CHARITY HAS 100% OF DONATIONS GO TO PROVIDING SERVICES! I am sorry to yell like that, but this needs to be made clear. There are always administrative costs and usually fund raising costs involved. I do not think that any of these charities actually advertise that 100% of your donation goes toward the programs, but the person that created this image isn’t doing them any favors by making that dubious claim.
2. It seems clear that whoever put this list together has an agenda. They clearly have something against the top 5 charities and have a soft spot for the bottom 10. I have no idea why. As you will see, they definitely could have found some worse the there bad ones (and they actually could have made some of them seem worse), and some of their good ones are pretty weak by the same standards. If you want to forget about this random selection of charities and just find the “best” ones overall or in a specific category, check out Charity Navigator.
3. It has become popular to care about and report on what the CEO of an organization earns. I do not think that is fair, nor do I see it as a very relevant measure of how the charity uses their money. All the charities listed are multi-million dollar organizations. Many have hundreds of millions of dollars in donations every year and the Red Cross is a multi-BILLION dollar organization. Why shouldn’t the CEO (and other executives) make a large salary?  I guarantee the CEO of a similar sized for-profit company will have a higher salary than these charity CEO’s and their total compensation is generally much higher because of stocks and options that are available. Just watch the first 5 and a half minutes of this TED Talk by Dan Pallotta, he talks about this very compensation issue.
4. It is nice to know that charities are doing as much with what they have as possible. However, again, measuring the percentage of expenses that goes to services versus overhead may not be the best way to measure success of an organization. I’ll again defer to Dan Pallotta in a later part of the same TED talk to explain why. Maybe, looking at the ratio of fundraising expense to total donations, called the Fundraising Efficiency, is a slightly better indicator, but I’m not sure. Unfortunately, those are the primary figures that we currently use to compare charitable organizations, so they are what I will be sharing.

One more note. I found most of my information at Charity Navigator with a little additional help from ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer. In both cases, the information is from publicly available 990 Tax Forms that were filed with the IRS. If I had to look somewhere else for information, I’ll let you know.

Now, on with the show. Let’s start at the beginning. (Warning: This is long. If you would like to jump to my conclusions and a table of results, go here.)

American Red Cross

First, Marsha J. Evans has not been the President and CEO since she resigned in 2005. That shows how old this data is. I doubt much of it was correct even then, but it is important to recognize that. The current President and CEO is Gail McGovern, in case you were wondering, and her salary was not $651,957 plus expenses. Actually, she made a little more at $673,735 plus an additional $12,617 (which is presumably “expenses”). If you want to be appalled by that number, then go ahead, I guess. However, if the posters of this information want us to get upset that the American Red Cross has highly compensated executives, they missed a lot of opportunity. While they were pretty close with the CEO salary, they didn’t mention that there are actually 15 employees with a salary over $300,000, and the highest paid individual is actually no the CEO, but the Chief Investment Officer, whose total compensation was $824,781. Of course, they did have over $200 million in Investment income during that time frame, so…

Remember, this is a HUGE organization. They had over $1.5 billion in contributions and over $3.6 billion in total revenue. That would put them just outside the Fortune 500 if they were a for-profit company (#673). Even those high salaries are each only 0.02% of total expenses. As for the measurable statistics, 89.4% of total expenses go to programs and the fundraising efficiency is $0.19 (so they spend $0.19 on fundraising for every dollar of contribution raised). Both of these numbers are very good.

March of Dimes

It is NOT called the March of Dimes because only $0.10 of every dollar goes to charity. That is ridiculous just to think about. Even if a charity was that inefficient, they wouldn’t advertise their inefficiency as part of their name. The name was coined to be a play on the radio and newsreel series “The March of Time” that was popular when the organization was founded. The initial campaign collected more that $85,000, 10 cents at a time. They received over 30,000 envelopes each containing a dime.

I have no idea why the creator of this meme chose to make up such a ridiculous and easily verifiable statistic to attach the March of Dimes with. They could have used the tried and true attack of CEO salary. The CEO has a salary of $516,837, which is 0.33% of the organization’s total expenses. There are also 6 C-level executives that earn over $200,000. Their program expense percentage is lower than some (but actually higher than some on the “good” list in this meme), at 75% and they have a respectable fundraising efficiency, at $0.15. That number is especially notable, as they are one of only a few of the charities that I research that earns a significant amount of their contributions from fundraising events, and the only one that actually has the majority come from events. Of the $153 million dollars of total contributions $96 million, almost two-thirds, came from fundraising events.

The United Way

Okay, now, this one is fun! First, the United Way is broken up into many regional organizations which all operate somewhat independently to meet the needs of their local residents. For example, Charity Navigator showed me 25 results for United Way in Kansas. So, it may actually make more sense to look at your local United Way chapter to see how they are doing. However, there is a United Way Worldwide parent organization. I didn’t look into how they are all connected or what they do, but I’m guessing the support the local chapters financially, because I took a look at my local chapter and they are consistently operating at a deficit. This particular meme is talking about United Way Worldwide, because they name Brian Gallagher as the President.

This meme calls out Brian Gallagher, the President and CEO of United Way Worldwide, for having too high of a salary at $375,000 plus “numerous expense benefits.” As has already been mentioned, this is clearly old, but they appear to have had their numbers wrong, even then. I went all the way back to 2001, which appears to be the year before Brian Gallagher was named President and CEO of what was then United Way of America. The Interim President/CEO that year made $374,540 before benefits, so maybe that is where the number came from. At the time, they had $37 million in revenue and $44 million in expenses, so that was 0.85% of total expenses. Maybe they put the numbers together after Brian Gallagher was named President and CEO, but before financials were released for his first year on the job, but if they would have waited the could have been more upset because his salary for 2002 was $429,555!

The creator of this meme, then, would be shocked to know that the President of my local chapter, United Way of the Plains, makes $227,451 which is 1.36% of total expenses for an organization that has $15 million in revenue, program expenses at 85.6% and fundraising efficiency of $0.09. They would probably pass out when they heard the salary of President and CEO of United Way Worldwide, Brian Gallagher.

$1,318,695 Heck, his employee benefits package comes in at nearly as much as the salary that is listed as being so damning!

But…let’s put that into perspective. That number is 0.89% of total expenses, and unlike the smaller branches, the worldwide organization had a significant excess (can’t say profit, since they are a non-profit) of over $28 million for the last reported year. On top of that, the numbers that we can measure – even if we shouldn’t – are impressive. Program expenses account for 93.8% of total expenses, even with that high CEO salary the administrative expenses are only 3.9%, and their fundraising efficiency is $0.02! Charity Navigator rates them at 4 stars with a score of 96.46 out of 100.

UNICEF

Whoever put this together, really doesn’t like UNICEF or Caryl Stern, because they went after them on multiple fronts. However, they are wrong on all accounts. As the President and CEO, Caryl Stern had a salary of $582,961, which was 0.10% of total expenses and less than half of what is claimed. She does not get a Rolls Royce. UNICEF has a program expense percentage of 88.9% and a fundraising efficiency of $0.07, which are both great and nowhere near the 5 cents of every dollar claim. It should also be mentioned that while Stern has been president the revenue has more than doubled, to nearly $600 million and they are functioning in the black most years which has allowed them to build assets to create $1.1 million in investment income last year.

Goodwill

Again, somebody has it out for Goodwill for some reason. I have to admit, this one got me the first time I saw it. However, much like the UNICEF claims, this one is completely baseless. Goodwill Industries International is a non-profit, so there is no “owner,” but a President and CEO and is controlled be a volunteer board of directors. No one named Mark Curran has ever owned or headed any any Goodwill organization. Much like the United Way, there are many local Goodwill organizations.

Goodwill Industries International has not been rated by Charity Navigator, nor has my local Goodwill organization, Goodwill Industries of Kansas. However, the tax returns are available. The CEO of Goodwill International made $598,300 and several others make between $150,000 and $250,000. That salary is 1.09% of total expenses. Their program expenses appear to be 93% and they do virtually no fundraising, so fundraising efficiency is $0.013.  This is very, very good, but they count the majority of salary expenses are listed as program expenses, so some may question that. I don’t know what their hiring practices are, so maybe the hire individuals that would otherwise have trouble finding work.

The local Goodwill Industries of Kansas has not been rated by Charity Navigator, either, but again the information is available.The CEO salary is $187,788. The CFO and VP of Industrial Services also earn just over $100,00. The CEO salary is 1.07% of total expenses, much in line with the international organization. The program expenses, again most coming from salaries, is 88.7%. Fundraising efficiency is a little different for them, though. They have very little of their revenue com from what is labeled “contributions,” as most of it comes from “program service revenue,” i.e. sales from their thrift stores. Generally, the fundraising efficiency is calculated by fundraising expense divided by total contributions. Doing that, we get $0.64, which is clearly not great. However, if were to consider that for this organization all of the program services revenue comes from selling items that have been donate, or contributed, then that number becomes $0.014. (To be fair, if I did that for the international organization, their efficiency would become .8 cents!)

Wrapping up the bad

Phew! So that covers the five organizations with red letters that this meme tells us we should avoid. So, what is the big take-away from this analysis?

None of the information given is correct!

Yes, this post is old, but from what I can tell none of the information would have been correct when it was originally created, either. Some of it appears to have just been completely made up! What is more amazing to me, is that they appear to want us to be appalled by large executive salaries, but they missed the largest of the salaries in some organizations and grossly undershot the largest salary of any organization in the list. There is a comparison of what the meme says vs actual values for all the organizations at the bottom of this post.

Now for the good

Most of the organizations listed in the “good” group are not rated on Charity Navigator. This is because they are either not 501(c)(3) organizations – military non-profits have a different distinction – or they are religious organizations that do not have to file a 990 form. I don’t know if the creator of the meme did this on purpose to make research difficult, on those are just the charities they support.

The Salvation Army

This is the one that I was able to find the least amount of information on and had to go outside of the primary channels I was able to use for most of the charities listed. The Salvation Army is technically a church, and therefore does not have to file the same tax forms that other non-profits do. They do seem to submit information to the BBB and there are journalists who have more knowledge or access than I do that have found the relevant information in years past.

In 2018, the Salvation Army had $4.3 billion in revenue, more than the Red Cross. Forbes ranked them as the #5 largest U.S. charity at that time. The highest compensation paid was $273,107 in salary and other benefits. This may or may not be the National Commander, but I think it probably is and appears to possibly be for both he and his wife, who is also a member and employee of the Salvation Army. That number is only 0.007% of total expenses, which is an insanely low number in comparison to anything else on this list.

According to the numbers on the Forbes website, the program expenses are 82% of total expenses, which is respectable, but lower than I expected. Management and general expenses accounts for 11.6% which seems high, but could be accounted for be the large number of locations including physical thrift store locations. Fundraising efficiency is also respectable at $0.12, but considering all those bell ringers in front of stores are volunteers, it seems like that could be better, too.

The American Legion

The National Commander is claimed to have zero salary, which would mean it would be a volunteer position, much like a member of a charity board of directors. However, this does not seem to be true. It appears that the American Legion appoints a new National Commander mid-year, so on every year’s tax form there are two partial terms listed. The farthest back I could find was 2005, even then the annual salary for the National Commander was $97,008. For 2018, the National Commander salary was $132,012. There multiple National Vice Commanders and National Executive Committee members that receive no compensation. However, even stating that the National Commander only makes $132,012/year, which is 0.2% of total expenses would be more than a little disingenuous. There are 14 other employees that have a higher salary than the National Commander, and the Director of Membership salary comes in just under. There was a split year Executive Director, and the combined compensation the two was $548,967. This is the real CEO-type officer, and that salary seems in line with what we have seen, and is still only 0.7% of total expenses.

The other comparisons are difficult to make, because of two strange things about the tax forms compared to the previous charities. The show ZERO fundraising expense, so I guess that would put their fundraising efficiency at $0.00 to get their $13 million in contributions. However, they do spend $1.3 million dollars on “advertising and promotion” that is not counted as fundraising. Most other organizations include at least part of that line item as fundraising expense, but not all, so it may not be fair to count that as fundraising here if it wasn’t elsewhere, but if we wanted to go ahead and do that the efficiency would still be a very good $0.10. As for program service expenses, they list $0. So that would make program services 0% of their total expenses, which is obviously as bad as it can get. I’m sure that is not fair and that the American Legion does actually provide services. However, I’m researching the numbers, I will leave it to someone else to research the impact.

Veterans of Foreign Wars*

Interesting that the five organizations focused on military personnel all say the same thing. Looks like the original creator just wants people to donate money to military charities. That is fine, but the copy and paste job is sloppy and destroys any credibility they may have had. That being said, I’ll go ahead and take a look.

The VFW does not have a National Commander, but they have a Commander in Chief. Again, the term begins in the middle of the year, but combining the two partial salaries, we get $346,636 or 0.3% of total expenses. They do have 7 others that earn more that $100,000 and the Adjutant General is actually the highest earner at $373,367.

As for the other numbers, program expenses is only 62% and fundraising efficiency is fundraising efficiency is only $0.44. Not great!

*The VFW also has something called the VFW Foundation. This Foundation is locating at the same location as the VFW of the United States, however they seem to be a separate entity with separate leadership. Instead of having $100 million in revenue, the foundation has $6 million. The President, Secertary/Treasurer, and all other officers show their compensation as coming from “related organizations.” The President of the foundation is actually the Adjutant General of the parent organization, and the Secretary/Treasurer is the Quartermaster General. So, they are deeply connected. However, the VFW Foundation is rated on Charity Navigator. They have a 4-star 96.66/100 rating with program expenses of 85.4% and fundraising efficiency of $0.07. Since this seems to be the charitable arm of the organization, maybe it is more fair to look at it instead.

Disabled American Veterans**

Again, no National Commander, because copy/paste. The National Adjutant/CEO/SEC has a salary of $299,536. Seven other officers make over $175,000. The CEO salary is only 0.2% of total expenses. Program expenses are a bit on the low side compared to others at 68% and fundraising efficiency is $0.33. It may also be interesting to some to note that they had a $6.8 million operating loss in 2017 and $11.8 million loss in 2016.

**The DAV appears to have several other separate entities underneath them that are all receiving large contributions, either from the parent organization or in addition. One example is the Disabled American Veterans National Service Foundation, which in 2017 received $2 million in contributions, but also had $5 million dollars in investment revenue, did virtually no fundraising, paid no salaries, gave out $1.6 million in grants, and held $138 million in net assets. Another is the Disabled American Veterans Charitable Service Trust with $10 million in revenue that spent almost $7 million on program expenses, and again has no salaries, presumably because the employees are actually being compensated by the parent organization.

The Military Order of the Purple Heart

This one is in Charity Navigator as Purple Heart Foundation, and I believe it was the only 0-star rating that I saw. Again, they have no National Commander. The CEO and the COO are the two officers listed on the form. CEO has a salary of $185,000 (0.6% of expenses) and COO has a salary of $110,000.

They get such a low rating because they have a low program expense and a very high fundraising expense. Program expense is only 25.8% of total expenses and fundraising efficiency is $0.74. Fundraising expense accounts for 70% of total expenses. However, this rating may be unfair if you dig deeper. For example, they show revenue from sales of goods as $374 and cost of goods sold as $4,195,888, for a loss of $4,195,514. There is no explanation of what this is, but I’m guessing this might have something to do with medals that are presented for free or for a very minimal cost. There is no way to look at the standard numbers and account for this.

Also, of the $23 million in fundraising expense they list almost $16 million dollars in professional fundraising services and $7 for advertising. Most of the professional fundraising expenses come from thrift campaigns where the company running the campaign retained anywhere from 39% to 91% of the gross receipts. To me, it seems like they could work out better deals with some of their fundraising partners. If it was an organization I was involved in, I would be pushing them to do just that! However, those 5 campaigns did raise $2.8 million in net contributions, that they would not have otherwise had. This is where getting upset about overhead or fundraising costs can get sticky. They could cancel one thrift campaign that created $12 million of their fundraising expense, but that would also eliminate $2 million in net contributions. On the other hand, if they could get all those partners to lower their take of the revenue to 60% or less, they would increase net contributions to $10.8 million from $2.8 million. That would make a HUGE difference. It could change them from being in the red every year to being in the black! A much smaller fundraising piece, that they should absolutely stop doing immediately is direct mail solicitation. In 2017, direct mail solicitation brought in $382,040 in donations. That seems nice, until you realize that the spent $620,250 on the campaign. So, that fundraising campaign lost $238,210!

I went back a couple years to look and the numbers from 2016 were about the same for the thrift campaigns and the direct mail campaign. However, it is very different in 2015. One campaign that I haven’t mentioned that apparently began in 2016 is a car campaign, where cars were donated and sold. This campaign has done amazingly well and grew over the two years we have data for it. The best part about it is that the people running the campaign are only keeping about 15% of the gross, so 85% is going to the Purple Heart Foundation. It was also in 2016 that they seemed to restructure and add more thrift campaigns. In 2015, there were only two thrift campaigns and they raised $778,703. The difference is that 97% of that was retained by the Purple Heart Foundation. That is probably more than should be expected, but it shows the stark difference to now. Two other interesting things stand out on the 2015 form: Most of the money raised by fundraising campaigns ($862,155, double the amount in 2017) came from phone solicitation, and the costs for both phone solicitation and direct mail were around one-tenth the cost in 2017, from the same companies. However, it looks like that may have been the first year that they ran those campaigns, so they may have gotten a deal and it looks like they have been making adjustments in an attempt to find the best fundraising mix. In 2016, they actually spent 4.5 times more on phone solicitation, which brought in 2.7 times as many donations and netted 1.97 times as much.

Funny, this is an organization that I never really thought about before doing this research, and now I am interested to see how they did for the last fiscal year. They are the only one that I was able to dig specifically into fundraising efforts and see the inefficiencies that someone could actually help them with.

The Vietnam Veterans Association

I believe this organization is actually called Vietnam Veterans of America, Inc. The President of the organization has a salary of $77,458, and the Vice President, Secretary, and Treasurer all have equal salaries of about half that at $38,731. The highest paid officer, is actually the CFO with a salary of $120,994. This is still only 1.4% of total expenses. Program expenses are 69% of total and fundraising efficiency is $0.49. However, after looking at the 990 form, I am confused by what is reported. The two major fundraisers seem to be reported in a strange way. I think one is probably included in the total contributions and one may be reported elsewhere.

Contributions are listed as totaling $2,761,706, total fundraising expenses are reported at $1,360,856, and professional fundraising fees (what they pay organizations to run a fundraiser for them) are $160,349. They list two fundraising campaigns, a car donation program and a direct mail campaign. Unlike the Purple Heart Foundation’s direct mail campaign, this one was successful. It garnered $1.6 million with a cost of only $131,600. Of course, the have another $713,928 of “office expenses” that are labeled fundraising expenses, so it is likely that much of that went to supplies for the mailing campaign. It appears that the car donation campaign is actually included in the investment section under “sales of other items that are not inventory”. This campaign generated $4,456,129 in gross revenue, $560,404 of which went to the fundraising company, and $3,895,725 of which was retained by the VVA. This is different than the car campaign that the Purple Heart Foundation had, as the VVA says that the fundraiser did NOT have custody or control of contributions. That would mean that the VVA would have that custody and therefore would have been the ones buying and selling the cars, which would probably put it into the investment category. I do not know why the $506,404 paid to the entity running the fundraiser is not counted as professional fundraising fees, though. That amount was probably distributed to other categories for some reason. If we count the income from the car campaign in with donations, and assume the payment to the fundraiser was included, that has a dramatic impact on the fundraising efficiency dropping it to $0.19.

Make a Wish

As pointed out WAY above, no charity has 100% of donations go to services. That just isn’t feasible. The Make A Wish Foundation has a solid 3-star rating on Charity Navigator and is very similar in numbers to many of the other charities in this list, both the supposed bad and good.

The President and CEO has a salary of $585,793. There are also 14 other officers earning over $100,000, 8 of which earn over $200,000. Total salaries for officers and key employees is $2.9 million. Again, I will reiterate that I see nothing wrong with paying key employees a high salary. That is the only way you are going to get quality people in those positions. The CEO salary is only 0.62% of total expenses, remember, this is an organization with $99 million in revenue. Program expenses are 73.8% and fundraising efficiency is $0.17.

St. Jude Research Hospital

Actually, American Lebanese Syrian Associated Charities, Inc (ALSAC), which exists for the sole purpose of raising funds to support the operating and maintenance of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Again, less than 100% of donations go to services. However, they have a 4-star Charity Navigator rating with program expenses at 71.9% and fundraising efficiency at $0.15. Because the meme seems to care about these things, the CEO and Ex-Officio Director salary is $794,032 and 7 other officers earn over $425,000. These are just the highest paid employees that are listed. There are potentially many others making six figure salaries, as they report $120 million in other salaries, over half of which is counted toward fundraising expenses. Once again, I will say, I am not sure these salaries matter when they had over $1.8 billion in revenue ($1.4 billion from contributions) and spent over a billion dollars on program expenses, i.e., funding the hospital and their research.

It may or may not be relevant to note that they list an additional Ex-Officio Director who earns $1,058,448 from a “related organization.” He is the President and CEO of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. So, he doesn’t run the charity, he runs the hospital that the charity funds. Clearly, his salary would be part of the “program expenses” of the charity.

Ronald McDonald Houses

Say it with me, 100% of donations do not go to program expenses, but this one actually comes close, sort of***. They do get a perfect 100/100 score from Charity Navigator. Program expenses are very high at 92.7% and fundraising efficiency is $0.06. The President and CEO is also a trustee and is uncompensated just like all the other trustees. That really helps their financial numbers. I spent a lot of time trying to research if the CEO is actually getting paid in some other way, and I could not find anything. Because she is listed as both a trustee and the CEO, my guess is that it is a completely volunteer board. I could be wrong about that, though.

***Here is where the sort of comes in. This is another one that has a very large parent organization with many local chapters that it supports. If you look up any of the local chapters, you will see that they have CEO’s or executive directors, and possible other officers that do earn a salary. For example, the Chicagoland chapter had revenue of almost $10 million and has a CEO salary of $228,748 and five other employees making over $100,000. That is 2.38% of total expenses. This local chapter’s program expenses are 72.7% and fundraising efficiency is $0.15. My local chapter had $3.7 million in revenue, program expenses were 60% of total, and fundraising efficiency was $0.06. The executive director salary is $152,998, which is 12.8% of total expenses. So, your mileage may vary.

Lions Club International

There is not a lot to say here, so I will cut to the chase. Program expenses are a respectable 82.4% of total and fundraising efficiency is pretty standard at $0.13. The Executive Administrator salary is $197,428, which is 0.3% of total expenses. They are one organization that has a very high net asset amount allowing for a large amount of investment income and giving them over four years of working capital, which makes them very stable. They are also one of the only organizations I look at that when they list the five highest compensated independent contractors they list other charitable organizations including (not surprisingly) the International Association of Lions Clubs and the World Health Organization.

Wrapping up the good

So, you made it this far. If you are still with me, congratulations. I’ll let you in on a little secret. At the time I write this sentence, it is five days after I wrote the first sentence of this post. Five days! So, if you have made it this far, I am truly grateful. So, what did we learn about the green letter organizations.

None of the information given is correct!

Wait, wait, wait! That was what we learned about the first five! Yep, and surprise, surprise it is true for the 10 “good” charities on the list, as well. Of course, that seems to be mostly out of laziness on the part of the original creator, and really tells us much more about them than the charities in question. They chose 5 of the 10 to single out and say the leader earns zero salary, which was false on all accounts, but when they could have been correct in saying that the CEO of Ronald McDonald Houses takes no salary from the organization, they didn’t. Instead they chose to falsely claim that 100% of proceeds go directly to the needy (like they did with 4 of the 10), which simply cannot be true. It is almost comical to me that they were able to come up with a creative false statement for all of the charities they were bad-mouthing, but could only come up with 3 to share among the 10 charities that they want people to contribute to.

TL;DR

The Truth

What I truly found is that among the 15 charitable organizations listed, most are run fairly well based on looking at objective numbers with real data. There are a couple that have numbers that stand out as being much worse than one would hope, and they just happen to actually be in the section of organization that the meme wants you to donate to. Of course, there could be reasons that go beyond the numbers, and I tried to highlight that fact when I could.

As I stated previously, not all of the organizations were rated by Charity Navigator, but 10 of the 15 were, and my local United Way chapter was, as well, so I am going to throw them on the list. Here it is colored coded for you:

• Ronald McDonald Houses
• Veterans of Foreign Wars
• United Way of Worldwide
• United Way of the Plains
• St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital (ALSAC)
• UNICEF
• Lions Club International Foundation
• American Red Cross
• Make A Wish America
• March of Dimes
• The Purple Heart Foundation

To be fair, Lions Club International and above are all rated 4-stars by Charity Navigator, and American Red Cross and Make A Wish are both 3-star. Those are all good ratings.

What Did I Learn?

I learned that this can be really confusing when you’re trying to find a geed charity to support. I learned that good is subjective. I learned that it doesn’t necessarily matter how much the officers make at a charity as long as the charity is doing good things.I learned that maybe we need to think about things a little bit more before we post them.

I learned that the best way to choose a charity us probably just to find one that does what you want and then check them out on a website like Charity Navigator to see what their ratings look like. If you don’t like their ratings, there are other suggestions for similar charities, or you can contact the charity and see if you can find out why they don’t measure up to your standards. Maybe there’s something going on there financially that an algorithm just doesn’t understand, but maybe there’s not. Maybe they’re just not managing their money well and they need some help. Maybe you can help them.

These kinds of memes are showing up right now because it is the “giving season.” Maybe it should also be the “helping season,” or the “forgiving season.” Why do we have to go after other organizations that we maybe don’t total agree with? Why can’t we just spotlight the organizations that we do agree with? Let’s try creating memes that show all the good that your favorite charity does, instead! Let’s try creating memes that make people feel good.

I know people think they’re helping others by sharing these things, because they’re trying to help you know where to give and where not to give. But giving is so personal! You can’t tell somebody that they shouldn’t give to the Red Cross just because their CEO makes half a million dollars a year. Who cares? The Red Cross has 3.6 BILLION dollars in revenue, and spends 2.8 BILLION dollars on their programs every year! They’re doing amazing things! Why does it matter if the CEO actually gets paid?

Also…

• Don’t just blindly support (or not support) organizations because you heard something good (or bad) about them.
• Come on people! It’s almost 2020. A quick Google search could tell you a lot.

Granted, it took me a week to research and write this (ridiculously) long post, but that is because, you know, I’m a nerd and I really got into the numbers. Plus, it takes me a while to think through things and put them down in writing. However, a quick search told me that most of the stuff in the first row, about the so-called “bad” charities, was completely off base, and a discerning eye could see that the stuff about the so-called “good” charities was probably all just made up. They all say one of the same two things for 9 out of 10 of the organizations.

Photo by Arseny Togulev on Unsplash