Tag Archives: fundraising

Activism, Economics, Education, Equality, Family, Neoliberal Economics

Public School Fundraising = Bleeding Wallet + Unreal Expectations

14 Comments

Ah, the optimism of a newly-minted, first time kindergarten parent! Isn’t it refreshing? Blissful?

Ignorant.

Seasoned parents (for fear of driving away fresh and enthusiastic blood to work the Dairy-Soy-Gluten-Peanut Free Hot Dog Day and monitor the playground in sub-zero weather) fail to disseminate vital information to the newcomers at the beginning of the school year. If the school were an olde-tyme internet chat room, the mid-September newsletter would read like this:

“N00Bs! U have been pwnd by the PAC Fundraising Committee!!111!! All UR wallets belong to us!”

Last night, I nearly wept as I pulled yet another fundraising catalog out of a dingy backpack, along with a PAC notice, which advised me that I was allowed to opt out of the fundraising for the 2010/11 school year.

For a minimum contribution of $100/child.

It is only the first week of October. *gnaws wrists*

If my math is correct, the school is trying to raise at least $50,000 this year, based on a minimum of $100 child, in a school with 500 children.

FIFTY GRAND.

This means that each child is being asked to either provide money from the parents directly, allowing them to skip the plethora of inane fundraising projects, OR participate in the 5 + fundraisers through the year by selling products/asking for pledges.

God have mercy on your wallet if you have multiple children.

Since September 8, I have had money liberated from my bank account, via/for my children’s schools, as follows:

  • $35 for communal classroom art supplies
  • $65 registration fee
  • $35  for criminal record check so I can volunteer
  • $40 = runners x 2
  • $40 for school photos

“Whew! Glad that’s over!” I said to myself.

Then the fundraising-hell clusterfuck began.

The eldest child came home with a glossy, slick kit, enabling her to go door to door to sell over-priced magazines. The more magazines the kids sell, the more money the PAC gets to put towards their annual projects. That’s fine and dandy if you’re able to get Granny and Gramps to renew their National Geographic subscription from McMaddysonne so she can get credit for the sale. Or perhaps you’re one of those perky-types that brings the kit to work with you and guilts your co-workers into buying so that you leave them alone until the next fundraiser! But..what if you’re not? Now your kid, is left to go door to door (which is a potentially dangerous enterprise for a young child) or not participate. Never mind that really young students can’t really read or write to take the orders.

Now it’s your problem, Mama.

Then the next note came, about the Walk-A-Thon, with a pledge sheet, once again imploring my kid to harass the neighborhood for pledges.

Following that was a set of four Scholastic Book orders, imploring me to order books, so that funding can go towards buying books for the classroom.

By the time the PAC sent a note home to remind me that there were still a Read-A-Thon to pledge, a bake sale, a plant sale, a family dance and silent auction and a community breakfast to pay for, I was about ready to homeschool.

But wait! There’s more!

This morning the younger child arrived home  with an envelope full of wrapping paper swatches, a catalog,  yet another set of Scholastic order forms, and a note advising us that she (at the age of 3.5) needs to get in touch with her inner Iacocca. Yes, my preschooler needs to move ridiculous volumes of wrapping paper and ribbon by the 25th, so her preschool can afford a new kitchen. Her government funded preschool.

Therein lies the problem, folks…

The government.

We’ve let them off the hook. We allow them to continue to slash funding to our schools…to whittle it down to a stump  that barely passes for what was once a decent public education.  Whether it’s through apathy or lack of involvement on behalf of the parents, the province axes more and more programming every year and almost nobody bats an eyelash.

Shhhh. Listen!

*Poof!*

There goes more and more funding.

Enter the fundraising machine.

School fundraising is a stop-gap measure, which allows the PAC to make up for the deficit left behind by the government termites. Every year, things need replacing. Improving. Renewal. That funding must come from somewhere. After all, who doesn’t love a new playground that isn’t a tetanus orgy, a field that isn’t filled with dog-dung land mines, or perhaps, the luxury of *gasp* library books?

While the mindset of the PAC is altruistic (supply needs of the classroom through fundraising) the necessity to do so is a sickening and pathetic statement of how little our elected representatives value public education.

Why do you hate fundraising so much, Tia?

  • Fundraising is a disservice to children in poorer socioeconomic neighbourhoods. Public education should provide all children with equal opportunity to learn, play and be safe at school. Fundraising creates tiers in this system, allowing children in more affluent neighbourhoods to raise more money, thereby having increased access to better equipment, field trips, books and educational tools. Less disposable income in a home means less fundraising dollars and parental buy-in, therefore less ability to improve the school beyond what the school board allocates.
  • Fundraising lets the Province off the hook. The more the PAC fundraises and provides amenities to the school, the less the government feels the need to kick in. Good luck trying to get it back once it’s gone, folks.
  • Fundraising masks the government’s failure to provide. If you are not active in school decision-making (and most are not) you will never know where the funding comes from, where it goes to, and how it is spent. Sitting in on even one PAC meeting each year will allow you to see just how much money went into PAC coffers, where it is being allocated, and just how little the government is actually kicking in for items like Smart-Boards and balls for the gymnasium.
  • Fundraising allows private corporations to profiteer off of young children. That company that has you and your child selling $100 subscriptions to Popular Mechanics? Is not doing it because they care about the community. They’re doing it because it’s an effective and brilliant sales strategy. What company doesn’t want thousands of young Canadians (and their parents) acting as unpaid sales and merchandising reps for them across the country? It’s a brilliant way to take your product to market with little overhead. Think about it. What a marketing strategy! Your kid goes door to door for their company, in the name of the school. The company hauls thousands of dollars per campaign. The school gets a few token bucks tossed their way. Child labor in Canada? Alive and well, thank you very much.
  • Fundraising places a strain on parents and caregivers financially. In an era where we’re already taxed to the hilt, paying through the nose for every aspect of our lives, and watching our standard of living slip into the abyss, the perpetual requests for handouts by the school add insult to injury. The pain of the hit to the wallet increases exponentially with every subsequent child. Woe to ye who dare to put your children in sports or music activities on top of this, for they too require fundraising and fees galore.

I for one would be glad to end the madness, and do away with the fundraising all together. Our time and energy would be much better spent being an active participant in holding the feet of our politicians to the fire, demanding better funding for our children, and protecting our families from additional stress and burden caused by excessive wallet bleeding.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to figure out how to sell 2 cases of Girl Guide Cookies by the end of the month, which is another story all together.

Canada, Education, Journalism, Media, Psychology

CBC and the CRA Disparage Canadian Charities

4 Comments

It’s unfortunate that the CBC, in trying to tell a story with CRA data about how Canadian charities use external fundraising companies, actually erodes the level of understanding in the public of how charities operate.

At a time when enhancing community fabric and financial selflessness are growing in importance, we need quality, complete and reliable information when it comes to how we exercise our charity.

Having enjoyed several years of volunteering with the Canadian Red Cross youth and international development departments in the mid 1980s, I credit that organization with a number of things:

  • providing my foundational understanding of global politics and development
  • understanding the role of leadership and volunteerism in society
  • allowing me to appreciate the joy of teaching, educating and facilitating
  • teaching me the extraordinarily valuable role of the international Red Cross as a neutral organization

The last part of the Red Cross is what I cherish most, in part because I find myself unable to hold myself to the standard of neutrality required to continue working with the Red Cross for the last two decades. I am quite partisan and find it utterly impossible to avoid that.

Being incapable of that kind of neutrality in the face of the dominant political issues of the world helps me understand the value of neutrality that the Red Cross embodies.

That said, I was disturbed when I read the CBC report with some statistics indicating that information from the Canada Revenue Agency shows that the Red Cross wasted/spent/invested 88% of earned donations with external fundraisers in 2009: $1.2m of $1.4m raised. You can search for fundraising information in a variety of ways at this link.

Despite my sentimentalism, idealism and bias, I still couldn’t really accept that as plausible for the Red Cross.

The “CBC investigation” found that external fundraising companies are doing great business, $750m over the last five years, while undermining the value of donations to charities by in some cases “billing charities for well over half the money they collect — and in some cases, more than 90 per cent.”

So I simply contacted the Red Cross to INVESTIGATE if they had a comment on that 88% fundraising cost for last year, something the CBC could have done to present a full story. And if they had done more than include a few statements about how the CRA numbers available through their link may not represent all the fundraising a charity is doing, etc., they would have found out what I did: the data tells a wildly incomplete story and leaves readers with profound and unwarranted cynicism, which you can read about in the dozens of comments on the webpage.

Here’s some of what I found out:

  1. In 2009-2010, the cost of fundraising excluding lotteries and gaming was 10.5$.
  2. Averaged over five years, the cost of fundraising excluding lotteries and gaming was 11.9%.
  3. Following large disasters, such as the recent earthquake in Haiti, the cost of fundraising will not exceed 5 per cent.
  4. The audited financial statements in a charity’s annual report are a far more thorough source of complete and accurate information than a quick link in a web story.
  5. Many charities have dozens, hundreds or thousands of volunteers who provide services for free and with no substantial costs.
  6. Typical goals for third party contractors can be a ratio of 7:1 for revenue versus costs, but in the first year of such programs, breaking even can be a realistic goal.
  7. Some fundraising activities cost more money but are part of an overall strategy, like building awareness of programs and issues.
  8. Some fundraising methods in some provinces have higher operating costs than others, like lotteries or gaming revenue.

But one problem with charitable donations is that people don’t always have the required time to do their due diligence in ensuring the operations of a charity fit their standards. Web stories like this CBC piece can be a short cut to help people decide who is worthy of supporting, but they can also turn into the complete investigation that people make. Incomplete reporting in this piece lead to people embracing inaccurate conclusions.

Another problem is that many people are not able to fully interpret audited financial statements, which means many will avoid doing the extra research required to become properly informed about charities they are interested in supporting. That is why it is in charities’ best interest to provide plain language information about their funding processes with information from those audited financial reports.

In examining the Red Cross website, it is easy to see their Corporate Information page underneath the “About the Red Cross” link on their homepage. The corporate information page includes the last ten years of financial statements and foundational information about the Red Cross. The Our fundraisers page includes information on fundraising activities. But as I mentioned above the Red Cross could build a plain language webpage that talks about many of the core concerns people have about their donations, like administrative costs. And they could provide numerous links to that page on webpages people might have that question pop into their head.

What would people learn from such a page?

It could provide a simplified presentation of the information on page 47 [pdf page 51] of the 2009-2010 annual report, which shows the cost of fundraising.

Over the last five years, the Red Cross has collected $615 million in fundraising revenue while its expenses were $93 million, providing an administrative cost of 15.2%, or 11.9% when factoring out the more expensive lotteries and gaming fundraising.

Turning back to the CBC piece, the $1.4 and $1.2 million figures for 2009 are quite insignificant. Or looking the other way around, trying to conclude anything about the efficacy of donations to the Red Cross from the CBC web story leads to disparaging results.

In the end, I question the nature of the “investigation” that CBC conducted.

The web story is short. It includes a link to the CRA’s searchable database, which, when you enter Red Cross, you encounter a [typically] cryptic CRA document full of organization codes that would certainly require a certain amount of familiarity with the CRA to decypher. The CRA certainly could use a lesson in plain language database presentation.

Nevertheless, in the sea of CRA codes are two dollar values: the $1.4 and $1.2 million figures that show up in the chart on the CBC web story.

I would suggest there is no real investigation involved in the CBC web story. Merely presenting the only two easily discernible pieces of information from a tax database which horribly misrepresents a charity’s overall fundraising context is irresponsible. When I can spend 10 minutes with financial statements and 20 minutes on the phone with a Red Cross media staff person and get a rather robust picture of the organization’s financial status, I can safely say the CBC didn’t do its job.

In fact, I would suggest further that whatever the CBC decided was the story, they missed the real story: the CRA’s public database designed to help Canadians understand charities’ fundraising context presents largely useless and ultimately disparaging information. That the CBC decided to parrot that inadequate information is a disservice to Canadians. And while I have affection for the CBC that rivals my affection for the Red Cross, I have to side with the Red Cross on this one.

Certainly no one has the time to investigate the 85,000 registered charities in Canada, but the least the CBC could have done would have been to explore the context with more than a few disclaimer statements that have done little or nothing to contextualize the disappointed comments provided by readers on the web page. The CBC could have explored a few large and small charities in more depth to see that the CRA data is inadequate.

Short of replying to each of the dozens of people commenting on the web page, we are left with hoping that people will do more investigation into the charities they consider supporting.

And while the CBC did include this other story on their website last week about what to look for when picking a charity, I’m afraid their piece on external fundraiser costs has done more damage than the useful advice elsewhere.