This was strange. Being on the other side of the interview is defiantly a new an experience. I chose to do my mom. She is a stay at home mom who thinks Philanthropy is just for people with millions of dollars and giving a ton of money to a charity, but she also said that it is a “noble thing to do.” I choose to interview my mom because even though she didn’t know it when i interviewed her that she is one of the biggest philanthropists i know. What surprised me was that my mom didn’t relies that she was such an exemplary philanthropist and until this interview i really didn’t think about it ether.
Fundraising
March 13, 2014 by Leave a Comment
My group is having a very hard time to make our Fundraiser happen. Its not that we don’t have many ideas its that we have to many. Like first we were just going to sit in front of target and just ask for some money but when we asked target they asked for some papers that we didn’t have it so it put us in a strange situation. Then we had the idea of selling fresas con crema or strawberry’s with cream but it turns out we can’t prepare the food for legal reasons on campus so that idea got shot down too. Now our idea is too sell chocolate covered strawberries and i think we are starting on Friday so that’s good.
Calling
March 13, 2014 by Leave a Comment
During this week we were supposed to call organizations and ask them information about it to see what the staff was like and if it seemed like they really cared, the only problem was the organization(that i called twice…) never got back to me so this was kind of hard. Lucky i just asked my friend Annie how her experience was and she said that after talking to the founder of her organization and reviewing the tax form it was very easy to decided that her organization was poorly maintained and that without a high amount of donations her non profit would close in less then a month. :/
Taxes
March 13, 2014 by Leave a Comment
To me this section of MSP has been the most eye opening. Not only did i love crunching the numbers to change quantitative data to qualitative I also found that at the rate my organization was spending there money they weren’t very responsible and careful. For me in the future when I do more philanthropy i’m definitely going to ask for the 990 tax document because you can really get a lot of info out of it and without doing it you could just be throughing cash at someone who isn’t really helping anyone but themselves.
No Representation Without Taxation… Taxation Form 990
March 12, 2014 by Leave a Comment
Blog 4
Not too long ago, we learned about taxes.
It is so important to analyze an organization’s taxes, (more specifically, form 990) because their taxes tell you EVERYTHING you need to consider. For instance, they tell you how much of a downer’s donations go toward the cause, how much is allocated to the staff, how much are put toward fund raising and how much it costs to raise one dollar. Let’s say 70% go toward management, then you probably would not want to waste your money on that organization.
I chose Feeding America to analyze. After filling out Ryan’s worksheet, I got a better understanding of how donations are spent. Personally, I found the worksheet very satisfying to fill out; I felt like a powerful judge, judging Feeding America in a matter of 15 minutes.