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Who's Making the Money Here?

By Don Lipper

     The room got suddenly tense. It wasn’t the sort of scenario where people expected to hear the deepest secrets of an assault victim.            
     In the break room of a Sacramento Wal-Mart, 25 blue-vested employees gathered to hear Nancy Olson’s pitch for United Way.  As she described how contributions from their paychecks could help 90 area charities, one worker raised her hand and divulged that she had been a victim of domestic violence and explained how a United Way charity helped her find a safe haven to escape her situation and rebuild her life.            
     For Olson, such revelations are commonplace. Potential contributors at her meetings still have good associations with United Way, despite being royally knocked by a scandal a few years ago at the national office and saber rattling by 77 Sacramento-area charities about how the local office was using the money raised.             
     “United Ways across the country have shifted gears about how they’re raising and allocating funds,” says Olson, senior director of private-sector campaigns. “The transition process — a new approach to delivering services directly to the needy —caused a lot of angst among charities because it was not translated as members in the local community would’ve liked.” Now most of the charities are back on board.            
     Despite Wal-Mart’s offer to match employee United Way contributions dollar for dollar, Olson faces hard questions from skeptics. What’s the measurable impact of my contribution? She replies, “Your dollar helped X number of kids get after-school programs or helped X number of homeless.”            
     Then she gets the BIG question that’s rocking the entire charitable world: “What percent of my dollars is going to the charity?”            
     According to Olson, if you designate a specific charity on an employee deduction form, the administration fee is 15 percent, if it goes into the community-impact fund, the administration fee is 20 percent. “We’re hoping to get that down to 17 percent,” says Olson. “The industry average is anywhere from 25-40 percent.”            
Continued...

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