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Digital Fundraising Booms For Haiti Relief
It seems that a recent digital fundraising drive for Haiti relief has stunned organizers at the Red Cross and White House. As of the last tally on Friday the campaign was at well over $8 million. "Earlier Thursday, when the Red Cross topped $3 million in text and social media donations — it hit nearly $40 million from all sources by late Thursday — spokesman Jonathan Aiken described it as 'a phenomenal number that's never been achieved before. People text up to three times at 10 bucks a pop,' Aiken said. 'You're talking about roughly 300,000 people actually spontaneously deciding, "I can spare $10 for this." And that's remarkable.' As of late Thursday, more than half of all donations to the Red Cross's Haiti relief effort had been received online, according to a news release.
A second article states that it usually takes 90 days for the donation to be transferred.
While the phone companies are looking at how to speed this up, am I the only one who believes that this would be a good way for some banks to earn back some credibility? It seems like they could give the Red Cross a 90 day loan to give them the money today, at 0%. Makes them look really good.
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Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
I think you're going to find that it gets wasted in the same way most charitable donations get wasted. Well over 50% of the money gets consumed in administrative overhead.
The redcross is not most charities; they have a very good reputation for low overhead. Katrina lost only 9% of your donation to overhead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Red_Cross. The red cross is one of the few charities I still donate to because of their low overhead costs.
And GP, the red cross has been around since before 1900 and whatever slip ups they might be accused of, people are still donating.
So, my question to you is: Can you volunteer full time, half time? Specially right know, who can afford to leave their jobs for weeks to go to Haiti to volunteer full time?
10% overhead is a very reasonable figure if we cannot bother to get our butts out of the couch and go there ourselves.
Charitable organizations, like any organization, need permanent staff to operate efficiently. You might get college kids to work for you over the summer for nothing but room and board, but no one will work for you on any kind of long-term basis for that. If you want long-term employees, particularly skilled employees, you have to pay for them. Sure, they might work for you for less than they could get in the private sector (and many do), but they still need money to feed their own families.
Saying you refuse to give to any charities because there may be some amount of waste in them is just a way for you to rationalize your own selfishness. The fact is these organizations do far more good than any of us would be capable of or willing to do on our own. Because we won't or can't go out and dig new wells in Africa or help rebuild houses in Haiti or any of the other things these charities do, we give money to them to help them do it instead. They in turn hire people who know how to do this stuff in the most effective and efficient way possible.