Talk:United Way of America
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[edit] Merge in
[edit] America's Charities
According to http://charities.org/about/ says that 6.5% of donations go to overhead. While the article claims that 100% of donations go to individual charities. I will change the information when I have a moment, just putting this here as a reminder for myself and any maintainers. Kode 16:51, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
- It doesn't seem useful to talk about another charity's overhead rate without discussion of the United Way's overhead. Keep in mind that each city or county United Way will have a different amount of overhead, depending on the size of their staff and the amount of independent programming they engage in. Rich 21:56, 22 February 2006 (UTC)
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- Agreed - there are over 1,300 United Ways in the United States and about 3,000 United Ways outside of the United States... each has its own overhead rate. Also, is this article about "United Way" the system or "United Way of America" the headquarters? Not sure why United Way of King County is included in this article because it is only one of the 1,300 or so in the U.S.
Note - the following text is not from me, but I deleted this content from the article page as it belongs more appropriately on this page: The argument that United Way's add administrative costs to funded agencies due to administrative fees that are subtracted from the base allocation is partially correct, but misses the point that, theoretically, the agencies spend less in fund raising since United Way centralizes that function for all agencies and thus their administrative/fund raising costs are reduced through this more effecient fund raising approach. One could question whether the fund raising effeciences offsets the fees deducted from thier funding allocation. For many smaller organizations, I suspect that the benefits of a combined campaign far outweigh any fees paid. Moved by: --Areback 00:25, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
It looks like someone from United Way got their hands on this article and sanitized it. The logo was updated, lots of heavy PR stuff was added and all criticism was removed. I'm a noob here, but I don't think that was an appropriate edit. I re-added the criticism and merged in the bit about elaine chow, plus the info about her predecessor to give some context to the statement.
[edit] History
I removed the mention of Arimony from the history section since he already is mentioned in the "Scandals and Criticism" section... no need to have it in two places.
[edit] scandals
The two criticisms "this practice has effectively been stopped" needs some source. I am going to mark them as citation needed, and if some reference doesn't show up in a few days, delete the addition for being unsourced Gaijin42 17:24, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
- Someone got there just as I added this talk item. Since the item is from the United Way, I am not sure that it counts as an unbiased source, a 3rd party statement saying things have been cleaned up would be better, but I will let it set for now. Gaijin42 17:32, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
- Kim Tran was the CFO of the DC chapter, which is among 1,350 chapters across the country. This needs to be made clear since the actions of one chapter do not necessarily reflect what is happening in the other 1,300+ chapters.
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- I am fine with this clarification. Gaijin42 15:31, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
This statement is incorrect: Since United Way isn't a charity by itself, but merely an administrative program to synergize fund raising, it adds an additional level of overhead to organizational costs. If money is donated to United Way instead of directly to charitable organizations, a smaller part of it actually reaches its intended targets. Because of this, United Way organizations typically suffer from an administrational overhead of 10%-20% instead of 5%-15% that many other well-known charities have. This may be offset by the increased total number of charitible dollars donated, because of United Way's efforts.
I am removing it for now until it can be sourced. United Way is not just an administrative program and does a lot of programming on its own (see common focus areas).
