What Social Cause should we support?

[David P]

As a manager at a medium size business dealing with sports apparel we are always looking for ways to give back to the community. I suggested to our management that we give out proceeds to a number of social causes (Frankly, it’d also help with some tax deductions too) similar to what Tom’s shoes does with Buy a Shoe, Give a shoe sort of thing or some other companies that plant trees or feed children from proceeds of every sale. We were exploring a few ideas and try something a little different that few or no other company has done so far:

Here are a few ideas:

– Work with a Debt Forgiveness agency to help athletes and families struggling and with unforeseen medical debt

– Work adoption centers to rescue pets on “sleep row”

– Youth groups to help kids go outside and explore the great outdoors

Please keep it to the point and let me know what you think about the 3 ideas above. Of course, I’m open to other ideas that you might be passionate about. Let’s keep it to the point and nothing polarizing please.

[David P]

Sorry for the blunder with the last post. DOn’t know why it was all HTMLed..

[Jerry Adams]

and you were victim to the first post not editable or deleteable bug

nice of you to be thinking about this

[Lester Moore]

A good strategy might be to look at your “average” customer, or create a few different archetypes of your various kinds of customers, and then see which non-profit organizations your customers would be most engaged with. Then research a list of causes you come up with to insure they are reputable, have good ratings and are tax deductible. That way you can support some good causes, relieve some tax burden and use your charitable giving as part of your marketing strategy to your customers.

[David Thomas]

Good on you for thinking of ways to give back!

I spent some of last month, in the Aleutians, chatting with a BPLer/lawyer about bankruptcies and how very many of them are due to medical debt.  Giving funds to help people pay their medical debt would be an endless money pit, but educating people to get to a non-profit agency or a bankruptcy attorney SOONER, before they’ve totally spent down assets or retirement plans they would have been able to keep would make a huge difference in their futures.  So some modest funding for such an agency and promoting that so more people are aware of those options could help a lot.

Since animal shelters are already in place, one additional thing that could help is more advertising of the animals available.  My 13-year-old daughter tried to work with the local shelter to get them a web presence and make profiles for the animals available, but they weren’t ready for any new-fangled social media.  Sigh.  That, and anything you can do to support spay&neuter clinics, especially free out-reach to pet owners who might not otherwise spay/neuter their pets.

My sister’s astronomy group (mostly old fogies) put on star parties in city parking lots.  They meet kids who didn’t know that they were stars up there (in inner LA), but with a modest telescope, you can see things through the urban light pollution.  Pivoting to your idea – leverage a group of old folks (i.e. Sierra Club hiking groups) into service projects to take kids into a regional park for a hike, nature walk, edible wild foods, etc.

[Ethan A.]

David this is very admirable of you and your company. All of those are worthwhile causes to me – I’m an animal lover and I’ve experienced first hand both as a participant and as a host how transformative taking kids outdoors can be. And ethically those animals are on sleep row because we humans who are fully responsible for them haven’t done right by them.

David T’s suggestions on animal shelters are good ones – helping animal rescue groups and shelters get the word out on animals for adoption through websites and social media goes a long way – the rescue volunteers and staff are usually too busy caring for the animals and lack the expertise. The lack of spay and neuter programs leads to a lot of needless suffering.

Regarding getting people outdoors, the Brooklyn Bridge Park Boathouse is a fantastic organization that takes thousands of people kayaking without charge right in the heart of NYC, including many urban kids who have never paddled before. In addition, they allow volunteers to participate in free half day, full day and some overnight trips and for many of the urban volunteers, it’s their first and only affordable opportunity to take such a trip. My wife and I volunteered with them this summer and it was great to see all the smiles especially on the faces of the kids. The Boathouse has been so successful getting large numbers of people paddling that the American Canoe Association is visiting this week. Getting more kids outside with good outdoor education means more voters caring about wild places and conservation. There are other worthwhile groups that focus on getting people and kids outdoors, including backpacking, I just mentioned BBPB because it was top of mind. Happy to put you in touch.

 

 

 

[David P]

Hey guys keep the suggestions coming! I love how passionate so many of you are about this. And here I was thinking I would get flak for the too little

@David Thomas. Do you know of any organization that are dedicated to educating people on medical debt? You are right it is a bottomless money pit especially since our medical system is so broken.

@Ethan. I like the idea of the free kayak but we’d like to work with a Non profit that is nationwide. We have been in talks with SOS Outreach (they take underprivileged kids skiing) and also Boys and Girls Club of America.

There are so many wonderful organizations out there. We are looking for what will make the biggest impact for the dollar and something that is not being addressed already by other companies who have some kind of social cause in their DNA

[d k]

https://content.sierraclub.org/outings/ico

 

 

[Ethan A.]

David, this is a list I put together a few years ago of non-profits focused on introducing disadvantaged and at-risk urban youth to the outdoors:

Big City Mountaineers

Urban Trekkers

Sierra Club Inner City Outings (dk mentioned above) – I know of ICO groups in chapters in the SF Bay Area, San Jose and Seattle though there may be more)

Have fun spreading the good vibes!

 

 

 

 

[BlackHatGuy]

I know you said you want something nationwide, but perhaps reconsider a bit and look local. Nationwide charities/nonprofits get all the press, and often most of the money. Too many spend too much on administrative costs (IMO), including some rather large salaries for the chief executive and other senior members.

But local nonprofits are doing great work in your back yard, and are always (or at least quite often) short of cash. No exorbitant salaries – in fact many have one or two paid people and the rest are volunteers. Your charity dollars can often go a lot further locally than they can nationally. And you get to see firsthand the good that your dollars do, instead of having to read about it in the annual report. FWIW.

[David P]

Hi Doug,

You make a great counterpoint there about the size of some of these non profit. That is why we completely scraped off the Sierra Club for example and wanted to focus on smaller – but still with nationwide footprint – NPO’s. I do hate how some of these NPos use as little as $0.60 on the dollar on the actual cause and the rest are typically managerial stuff

Is there one that you can recommend to us? Big City mountaineers definitely gets the press from backpacker magazine. We also plan on donating excess inventory to these organizations although there is nothing that says we can’t do two or more NPOs at the same time

[BlackHatGuy]

Hi David,

Sorry, I live in northern Washington, so have no idea about any local outfits in LA. Perhaps some LA folk can chime in.

[AK Granola]

Another worthy endeavor is teaching kids to swim, especially minority kids from lower income homes. It literally saves lives. Not sure if there is a nonprofit doing this in your area. Seems like that would fit with your business.

[Nick Gatel]

David said,

Frankly, it’d also help with some tax deductions too

I’m not an accountant, but for every $1 you donate the net decrease in income tax liability will probably be well under 25 cents… so it’s not a “tax deduction” but a desire to help. Donating apparel is another thing and I’ll get to that in a bit.

Doug said,

I know you said you want something nationwide, but perhaps reconsider a bit and look local. Nationwide charities/nonprofits get all the press, and often most of the money. Too many spend too much on administrative costs (IMO), including some rather large salaries for the chief executive and other senior members.

But local nonprofits are doing great work in your back yard, and are always (or at least quite often) short of cash. No exorbitant salaries – in fact many have one or two paid people and the rest are volunteers. Your charity dollars can often go a lot further locally than they can nationally. And you get to see firsthand the good that your dollars do, instead of having to read about it in the annual report. FWIW.

I’m with Doug on this 100%. With a local NPO, your company can influence other local businesses and individuals to help support them, and often your employees will become engaged and support them financially and as volunteers. The goal (IMO) should be to get the most bang for your donated bucks.

Now the problem is how to find a good NPO. A good metric is how much of revenue is spent on actual programs. You want to look for over 75%. There are organizations that rate NPOs and they are a good starting point. I’ll give two examples because in my area there are two worthwhile local NPOs (I’ll call them charities “A” and “B”) and not both are rated on both of the following websites.

http://www.charitynavigator.org

They rate on a scale of 1-4 stars. They also report the percent of money spent on programs. They give charity “A” a 4 star rating and report that charity “A” spends 83.3% of revenue on programs. They don’t rate charity “B”.

http://www.GuideStar.org

They rate charities as no rating, bronze, silver, and gold. If you register (free) you can download any charity’s (in their database) IRS Form 990 for review. This site does not rate charity “A” but gives charity “B” a Gold rating. Charity “B” generates about 17% of their revenue from thrift stores, so it is hard to determine percent spent on programs because store employee wages are reported on the Form 990. As far as analyzing a Form 990, it is probably something for a good accountant to review for you. All the items sold in the thrift stores are donated by the community. Donations can only be deducted by the donors at the price the thrift store will be expected to sell it at, and this (apparel) will be in the realm of your company’s accountant. Also the salaries of the executive officers are pretty low… under $200K, considering they are running an operation with over $40 million a year in revenue.

IMO, Charity Navigator and GuideStar are really just good places to start your search.

 

[Jerry Adams]

I agree percent spent on programs is a good thing

on the other hand, some people argue a non profit can be good even if it has a higher percentage overhead.  For example, if you pay management more, you can sometimes find someone that is better at soliciting funds so the amount of good done is actually more.  Or the management can be better at spending the funds efficiently.  If a higher percentage is spent on something, that doesn’t mean its better

I’m too lazy to find a link to a soure

I’m not saying you shouldn’t look at percentage of donations spent on programs, but more saying that its complicated

I thought Nick would be advocating for this : )

 

[Nick Gatel]

I thought Nick would be advocating for this : )

For personal reasons we give to the MS Society. It is an awful disease and hopefully someday it can be cured; perhaps it can’t be in our lifetime. It’s a worthwhile endeavor IMO. From the National MS Society website:

As efficient, effective stewards of our donors’ contributions, we make sure that more than 84 cents out of every dollar we raise goes directly to improve the lives of people living with MS through programs, services and research.

Approximately 16 cents of each dollar is spent on administration and fundraising — a ratio that is far better than the average of other successful nonprofit organizations.

Charity Navigator rating below based on the 2016 IRS Form 990:

 

 

But local organizations can solve local problems. Local NPOs often help solve problems whose results can be seen by the community. Often instead of looking to government to fix things we can pick out what is important to us and fix them ourselves, which can be rewarding.

 

[Graham F]

This is easy, this one:

https://www.givewell.org/charities/amf?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI8c7-5Mbh3AIVE6mWCh3PFg7vEAAYAiAAEgJ0kPD_BwE

https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/where-to-donate/against-malaria-foundation?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI8c7-5Mbh3AIVE6mWCh3PFg7vEAAYASAAEgJlVPD_BwE

The Against Malaria Foundation. Fully and transparently audited -you know where your money is going.

It often feels good to give, but does it really make a difference. With the AMF I feel certain, it does.

I do not give money if I do not know where it is going. This foundation makes an astonishing difference saving lives from one of the modern ages greatest killers.

Not in the US, or Australia where I am though, so probably puts some off.

[Eric Blumensaadt]

Define “Sports Apparel”.

If that means organized sports like baseball, basketball, etc. then pick your cause.

BUT if it means only outdoor sports like biking and backpacking then you have one main goal, save the planet from global warming/climate change. ’nuff sed.

[Art …]

I would urge you to think on this subject in the following way :

first – preserve life

second – improve life

It is difficult for me to see giving money for things like the Arts, or the environment when both humans and animals are dying all around us. Ditto things like Christmas presents or sports apparel for the needy or skiing or outdoor outreach. Critical issues like drinking water, food, and medical care should come first in my opinion. And yes the drinking water and food issues can in some cases be intertwined with environmental issues, so maybe opportunities for a two-fer here. Who is to say humans are more important than animals in this regard. I’ll leave that up to those donating to decide. Giving to improve life can be very beneficial to those few receiving, and I’m not knocking it. But somehow simply preserving life seems to me a huge improvement to those kept alive.

I won’t try to offer specific situations to give to. Researching this on your own is an important part of the process …

[BRYON L]

I’ll give you an example in my community. Our city is in a tough financial position, as many small cities are, and just keeping up with regular maintenance can be burdensome. We have a playground that is falling apart and roped off so it cannot be used; but we are struggling for the funds to both demolish it and replace it. Once done, a new playground will benefit hundreds of families in our community, if not thousands.

Call your local parks and rec director or someone in a similar position and ask what kinds of projects they have had on their wishlist but just can’t find the funds to do it. I would be shocked if they couldn’t name a few projects almost immediately. Meeting a tangible need will have an impact on a variety of levels, both with the project done and with lowering the stress level a little of your city workers/leaders. Projects like these reach across all kinds of cultural lines to benefit a multitude of people. And I’m sure they’ll be glad to install a sign somewhere that acknowledges your generosity.

[Nick Gatel]

Great idea!

[DAN-Y/FANCEE FEEST]

Help youth groups with Down syndrome. Organizations that direct activies to sports.

[DAN-Y/FANCEE FEEST]

Veterans with disabilities such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

[Author]

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