Articles tagged with "donation"

For every dollar you donate to charities, a portion is usually directed towards covering administrative and fundraising costs. What is the maximum percentage that is acceptable to you? The rule of thumb is a fundraising efficiency ratio of 30:70 - 70% to programming, and 30% to overheads (including fundraising, management, and other general costs). However, amongst charity watchdogs and monitors such as CharityWatch, Charity Intelligence Canada, and the Charities Review Council, a charity is considered financially efficient, or at least performing satisfactorily, if overhead spending is between 20 and 35%, with between 65 and 80% distributed to programmes. Some charities and non-profit trade organisations argue that excessive focus on financial overhead can cause harm, and can actually have an overall detrimental effect on programme investment. However, how overhead spending is calculated and communicated varies, and from some charities the amount deducted from donations for admin and fundraising is less than their true costs.

A couple of weeks ago in the newsletter we let you know about Siouxsie Wiles' fundraising campaign, and we pledged to match our members' donations up to a limit of $2,000. I'm pleased to say that, so far, we've reached over $1,500 in donations so far. But it would be even better if we could hit our $2,000 target! So if you plan to donate to Siouxsie, please let us know when you do so, and if you've already donated, send us evidence of your donation and we'll add you to our list. Just forward your donation email to news@skeptics.nz.

Siouxsie Wiles is well known to the NZ Skeptics. She has long been an active member of our organisation, helping us out by running Skeptics in the Pub events, MCing and giving talks at our conferences, writing articles for our journal, promoting us in public and much, much more. To illustrate this, these are photos from Wikipedia of Siouxsie sitting on discussion panels at our 2013 and 2015 conferences: