My work has a weird thing where they’ll ask you if you want $5 a paycheck to be taken out and given to a legitimate cause you choose. You don’t HAVE to do it but doing it means you are allowed to look at a book they have for up to 30 minutes listing all the charities they sponsor to choose your charity and everyone does it because it’s a “free” break.
I moved to the Bay Area just after there was a big scandal at our United Way. The first place I worked was big at pushing donations (and as a new guy I got stuck on the committee) but I moved to the place where the CEO didn’t trust UW and no more donations push.
I’m all for charitable giving (and big tips) but I want to give where it makes sense for me. The UW was for the county where I worked, not the one where I lived, so I had to find a charity where I could give where it made sense for me.
And I hope any companies that push employees to donate have rich execs who visibly donate. I I worked for Tesla and someone asked me to donate through the company, I’d laugh in their faces because Musk is a stingy piece of slime.
I have had the misfortune to see how visible giving by executives works in three large companies. In each case the “giving” flaunted by the executives was funded by the company.
Even the token gift and seemingly personal holiday card mailed to our homes “To Bill and Susan, from Mary, Chip & Fido” was funded by the company, They weren’t even handwriting and signing the bloody cards. They were using a service that would hand write the cards and envelopes and make it look like your boss actually took some time. For years I thought the executive assistants verifying the names or spouses/partners and children were at least passing it to their bosses. But nope. Straight to the gift mailing company in a spreadsheet (probably a web-based upload now).
Did you work for a small company? The best I ever got was an email. But that company gave everyone between Christmas and New Year’s off with full pay, and only critical people had to work. And it was not easy getting considered critical - they meant it as a vacation. I’ll take that over any cards, which are going to be about as personal as the one from your dentist anyway.
No, we have over hundreds of thousands of employees. But this only applies to the corporate office employees (about 3000 in the US)
This year’s gift for our department is a bottle of wine that is $14 retail. Good thing the Muslim guy quit two weeks ago.
See, that’s the fundamental problem with these “sponsor me to participate in this recreational event that’s essentially unrelated to the mission of the charity it’s nominally supporting” fundraising schticks.
No, nobody here is complaining about being “offended” by them, and nobody is saying you can’t be proud of yourself for having elicited tens of thousands of dollars by participating in them. But ultimately, the main reason such gimmicks work is because donors who feel no particular interest in supporting a specific charity feel a personal obligation or interest to support a friend’s or family member’s “sporting achievement” in the name of that charity.
You thought your acquaintance was supporting the Food Bank. But nah, if she’d wanted to do that she could have just donated to the Food Bank directly and skipped all the overhead costs of your essentially useless bike-ride event. She donated because in her mind it was an expression of support for you and your stated ambition to achieve a particular athletic goal.
Yeah, comparatively low-overhead events like a 5K walk, where participants are mostly funding themselves, are far more cost-effective than the more elaborate “charity challenges” like bike trips.
Yes, because she’s an ass, not me.
There there, nobody’s calling you an ass. The point that we charity-sporting-event-objectors are making is just that charity sporting events are successful precisely because they encourage exactly that sort of fundamental confusion about what it is that the participants’ “sponsors” are supporting.
Probably most of your “sponsors” don’t particularly give a rat’s ass about the Food Bank either, but they want to show some friendly support for Mighty_Mouse achieving his bike-ride goals, so they throw you some sponsorship bucks. (And someone who’s donated in the past might find it a bit personally awkward to back out when the next year’s email comes round.) And that’s why “charity bike rides” raise money, despite their relatively high overheads compared to other types of fundraising.
The division I work for has around 100 employees. The Division Head has three admin people working for him, each of whom is a middle aged woman that (I am guessing) is making at least $70K per year, plus they get good benefits. Every year at Christmas the Division Head sends around a big envelope, and each person is supposed to put money in the envelope. He then splits the money three ways and gives it as a “Thank you” gift to each admin person.
Monopoly money seems appropriate to me.
Most of the money I’ve given out this year has been to appeals from family. In the most recent case, a teenaged relative who had been gravely ill asked for donations for a charity that she had directly benefitted from. I probably wouldn’t have thought to give them money otherwise, but was perfectly happy to contribute: they really did a lot for her. (Ronald McDonald House UK, if anyone wants to contribute 
)
In general, I wouldn’t say I’m ever offended, or begrudge people their fundraising events. I am just annoyed at people presuming on social or workplace networks to extract money from me. I have occasionally been pressured into it for things like charity bikerides, and really resent the pressure if not making the donation or the charity it goes to. I don’t like the idea that I have to donate or my friendships / family relationships / work relationships will suffer.
I’m a little more actively irate when businesses push their low-wage employees to harass customers for small change at the counter, because it forces me into that same awkward zone with a person who has no choice in the matter.
Needless to say, I think that’s completely inappropriate.
I agree.
I understand they work hard. But everyone in our group works hard. Furthermore, I and many others are the ones writing proposals and bringing in work, and the profits we make go toward supporting our admin staff (but we are never “thanked” for that). I also wonder if it’s sexist or misogynistic. The vast majority of the employees are male engineers, and we are giving a cash gift to the three female admins. I suspect this wouldn’t be happening if the admins were male, or if we employed more female engineers. It just feels so 1950.
I’m pretty much against it at work. When you have a captive audience like that, you wonder how much free will is at work. For all I know a guy making a six-figure salary has aging parents to pay for or a debt to pay off or whatever.
But I’m also getting to where I scrutinize things twice. Take for example Wounded Warriors. Um, don’t we pay taxes to pay our troops (and fund the VA hospitals, etc.?) Why are we paying twice? But looking a bit deeper…
I’m not picking on them. Salvation Army was always a biggie at this time of year and I’m sure they’ve done lots of great things for people. But…
There have been other scandals. Anyway, my point is just that in addition to that, your employer is choosing a charity FOR you?
Interesting comment.
I think it’s relevant to the OP. Hopefully, my minor tangent will be, too.
Six, seven years ago, I traveled with a cousin to Central America. He’s an old Navy salvage diver who used to train SEALs to get wet.
We spent a month together in Guatemala.
One stormy night, in Antigua, we were watching hotel TV – a US-based channel. Wounded Warriors had a commercial on. I said, “Forgive me, Cousin, but I have to get on my soap box.”
[“Oh. This oughta’ be good,” said the long-time sailor]
I went on …
You adopt a puppy. You adopt a kid who’s starving in sub-Saharan Africa.
You do not “adopt” an injured warfighter.
We break 'em, we buy 'em. We give them whatever they need. We make their homes and vehicles (and lives) accessible. They want for nothing.
There’s no panhandling involved. They don’t beg. Nobody begs on their behalf.
Or we stop breaking them in the first place (which … y’know … maybe we should make the default position anyway).
He was quiet for like 20 minutes – heretofore unprecedented – at which point, he picked up his beer bottle and clinked mine: “Cheers, DavidNRockies,” he said.
I don’t like being extorted into paying money by those for whom there’s a perception of consequence or opprobrium for failure to participate.
I don’t like exhorting people who are struggling just to get by to finance a really affluent VITO’s pet project.
I don’t want to subsidize the cheap-ass Exec’s parsimony that keeps him from doing right by his three direct reports, either, as @Crafter_Man implies above.
Personally, I want to do my job – extremely well, if possible – and then go home 
Agreed. These folks served their country. Raise my taxes if that’s what it takes…but don’t make me think that if I don’t donate to this (non-government) entity (subject to what oversight?) on TV, that these military folks are going to suffer because American citizenry didn’t step up.
It might play out differently if the admins were male, but IME the practice of “technical-professional staff contribute to annual cash gifts for subordinate admin employees” has nothing to do with the gender composition of the technical-professional staff.
I work in an organization where technical-professional staff is 50% female, and we have annual cash collections for our (female) administrative assistant. (In our case, though, the envelope is not passed around but kept in a specified place for a specified time, and nobody knows who did or did not contribute or how much money they put in.)
As I understand it, this practice goes back to a time when partners and professional staff got substantial year-end bonuses and/or dividends, and passed along a little cash as a sweetener for their lower-paid clerical workers. I agree it seems kind of outdated now. Year-end bonuses should be provided by employers, in paychecks.
I work for a non-profit. No bonus or dividends.
Non-profit organizations can actually give out employee bonuses, and it was probably more common decades ago. But my point was just that the practice of collecting cash for the secretaries seems to have started as part of a corporate year-end-bonus culture, and has spread and persisted even in companies that don’t do year-end bonuses. (My employer doesn’t either.)
I work at a global 100 company that matches up to $15,000 per year per employee giving. That’s pretty huge.
It’s also anonymous. Or probably is. They do track what % of a manager (the bar may be higher than the lowest level manager) direct reports give. I always make sure to give something to check off big bosses box. But $5 meets the minimum bar. New employees get $50 to donate the first year.
And there is one month per year where the big managers and their over-achievers whip up the giving. Some of it’s pretty great, and some is pretty forced. There’s stuff like a manager will pay for a food truck for lunch, and then anyone that eats at the food truck is asked to donate what they want for the meal, which is then matched by corporate. I assume, the manager also does the same thing. And there’s other stuff that isn’t so fun but can be ignored like an auction.
I think it’s pretty great overall because great pains are made to make sure no one is forced to donate. And employees can donate to pretty much anything under the sun and it’s 100% matched. And as a company we raise an absolute shit ton of money.