quickdry135

Thanks and I get what you’re saying. One thing I hear from many of the nonprofits I work with is that they’re all competing for the same pot of money, so I have had to think more economically about who gets what given that there are many hands and not enough for each one. If your organization is able too increase the total pot of donations/funds rather than shift around the funds that are already there, I really applaud your organization.

I manage some of the corporate grants for my company in my spare time and one thing i've always wondered about is whether it's more impactful in the end to focus on the larger charities or help out some struggling ones (lesser known ones like you're doing).

One example from the recent past is that there are two nonprofits in my city that focus on helping recent and low income immigrant children with after school education and summer programs. One is large and includes a low income daycare, after school programs, leadership camps, library, etc. One is small and only has after school programs. They are about 4 blocks from each other and serve similar age groups and demographics. They both make a pitch but I ended up deciding to provide the grant to the larger group since they can use economies of scale and their already purchase physical resources (library, daycare, community center) to do more for more people. But the smaller one may have to close if they don't get more donations, which is bad because they do good work, but based on the numbers the bigger one can help 2x the kids with the same money as the smaller one.

Is this something you consider when choosing smaller organizations? Do you compare what other bigger ones might be out there and how they might overlap/do more with the same money with the larger infrastructure? How do you make these calls?

Thanks. That actually is a philosophy I subscribe to. For any grant distribution I basically do a returns analysis to maximize the impact of every dollar spent. I gave one example in my original comment but another is an annual company event for food donations to the city food depository. For some reason the original person running it took employee donated money, went to Costco to buy cans, then went to deliver those cans to the depository. The organization itself says that if you just give them the money they can feed 3 people for every $1 due to their scale and non-profit distribution partners. This person was buying like a canned goods for $2-3 each. Just such a waste.

My day job is strategic analytics in the financial services, so I personally hate this kind of pointless waste. I know it feels good to deliver a load of cans to the depository and see the gratitude, but it helps way less people then just taking all that money and donating it online through the funding portal. I try to take emotion out of the process as much as possible, especially since I have the luxury of managing company money and can be a bit more personally removed. (My own giving does have some inefficiencies for causes that I care extra for, but I still try to make sure my dollar works as hard as possible for those causes)

I do get the point of this kind of business though. Many people are driven to donate based on emotion not on logic, so for those people, they need something to motivate them otherwise they may not give. If this motivates additional people to donate beyond those that already do and follow efficient giving, then it’s still a net positive in my mind. The key is activating non donors.