Child's Play Approaches Half a Million Dollars

SecureTheNet writes "Created by Penny Arcade, the Child's Play Charity gives all toy and monetary donations directly to hospitals for distribution to sick kids. There are NO administration fees taken. As the holidays approach, the donations are approaching half a million dollars!"

Re:That is great..

[PhoenixFlare]

Dumping 500.000$ at once at an organisation that is not used to handling that kind of money isn't efficient .

If you'd actually read about the project, you'd see that the donations are split up among many different hospitals, and a large part of the donations are actually in the form of items bought through Amazon....So there is not going to be just a giant lump sum dumped on the charity or any of the receiving organizations.

Re:Could this be free (as in beer) charity?

[BrynM]

but I believe it is possible to write off donations against tax. In this case, it would be possible for a company to fund the administration of a charity at zero cost

INACPA (I'm not an accountant)... It would take the employees to file their yearly loss (because of hours "worked" at the charity instead of a job) as a charitable write-off because a charity (or other non-profit) cannot contribute to itself. Most donations that can be written off in the US have tangible value (cars, money, food), so writing off an employee's loss of income would be near impossible since it has no tangible value. Your company might be able to "donate" you to a charity and write off your salary though I bet.

UK Hospital Added

[FalconZero]

Child's play added a UK hospital: Alder Hey [alderhey.com] childrens hospital. So UK gamers/nerds out there should get over there and donate (if you havn't already).

Direct Links

• Alder Hey Wishlist [amazon.co.uk]
• Child's Play [childsplaycharity.org]
• Penny Arcade [penny-arcade.com]

another identical charity

[mliu]

It's pretty weird that there's another charity that does almost exactly the same thing as Child's Play. In fact I can't really see any difference other than the fact that Child's Play has the publicity associated with Penny-Arcade.

I first read about this other one because Microsoft made some sort of a large donation to it recently. Apparently it's been in operation since 2001 however, incorporated in 2003.
http://www.gaming-age.com/news/2005/12/2-3 [gaming-age.com]

Re:another identical charity

[ebuck]

Not unusual at all.

If you look around, there's a lot of charaties that perform similar functions. Sometimes they target the same demographic group, sometimes they are bound by the same activity, sometimes they are tied to the same organization.

For example, there's more than one charity that caters to childern in hospitals. Toys for Tots, Child's Play, Get Well Gamers, Candlelight Foundation, Make A Wish Foundation, and The Shriner's Organization. Apologies to those I've missed, as I can not even begin to list them all.

There's more than one charity that appeals to a particular activity. Runners can attest to every race being tied to one charity or another, the organization coordinating the race basically survives and coordinates the race by taking a small cut from the charity proceeds. It's not illegal or unethical, as few runners will pony up charity money un-prompted but most will not gripe about an entrance fee if a portion is going to promote public goodwill. Bingo is a simliar activity driven revenue source for charities, with bingo parlors happily donating a protion of the earnings to charaties to offset ill will towards gambling in the community, and the players love it as they can soothe their losses by knowing that some of the money went to a good cause. I know of bingo parlors in Texas where every game donates to a different charity.

Organizations are another binding agent in the distribution of charity money. If you donate to your alma mater or local college / university, you often can put stipulations on the donation which effictvely makes the organization a multi-charity. One example is to specify that the dontated money is to only be spent on the library, or the departement of Biology, etc. The US Goverment also accepts charity money under such circumstances, and have a departement to distribute charity funds to the correct recipients. I have known a few people who have placed clauses in their wills to have their assets forwarded to paying off the national debt.

So it's not a great travisty to have identical, or near-identical charities competeing in their various arenas. Without competition, even in charaties, they would soon fall prey to the problems inherit with any monopoly. For charaties, that would spell beaurocratic processes for donation, department-based "kingdom building", excessive administration, and less of the donation arriving to its intended recipient.

Be glad you have a choice, one day you may find that a charity is very inefficent in distributing funds, and you might consider changing charities to another that still fulfills your wishes, but is ran by someone else. Consumer reports did a published study of charity comparison, and it was shocking to see how some squandered over 60% of the funds in (mis-)management of the distribution of such funds.

There's an excellent description of the problem at http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/personal-financ e/charity-watchdogs-1205.htm [consumerreports.org]

And if you want to donate, http://www.charitywatch.org/ [charitywatch.org] is useful in separating out the dogs from the winners.