I worked for our local United Way for about a year and was also a member of the Board of Directors once I stopped working there (was awarded “Volunteer of the Year”). Then the Boy Scouts fiasco came up, our Board wouldn’t even consider cutting their funding, and I resigned. And then one of the Board members responded with a flurry of emails explaining why homosexuals shouldn’t be allowed to take care of children (I’m not making this up). This is a really conservative community - I do know of other United Ways that did cease Boy Scout funding.
United Way was started at the behest of, IIRC, Henry Ford, who was tired of having his assembly lines shut down every time a charity came in to ask for money. He agreed to permit one presentation per year. They are managed very locally, to the point where your United Way and the one in the next community over can be doing things quite differently even though they are a part of the same “metropolitan district”. There are even some United Ways who operate independently of their metropolitan districts and just do things on their own.
Our United Way was really frugal and didn’t pay me much ($8/hr to start, then $12 when the Director left & I had to take over all of the work). This is in suburban Chicago, where typical retail jobs pay $10/hr. Their overhead was incredibly low, we had free office space in a converted high school and old leftover furniture, plus a copier that belonged in the Smithsonian. When the new Director came in they paid her $20k/yr to work 3/4 time.
OTOH, it did strike me as an excuse for people to act fancy. Their big fundraising event was a golf outing at a country club which normally wouldn’t have permitted any of us within its gates. I sort of felt like they were reverse-slumming by letting us use their precious grass.
I’ll also tell you that their bookkeeping “system” was extremely strange. Reporting our figures to our district always left me perplexed, and I’ve done a lot of bookkeeping in various environments.
Frankly in this day and age, the charities for whom we raised funds have become quite savvy about seeking funding on their own. Most of them do their own web advertising, their own golf outings, their own events. The ones I knew of really didn’t rely on United Way for more than a small part of their budgets. The payroll deduction is probably the only “convenience” (or extortion, depending on where you work) United Way still has to offer. And I do know of some United Ways that will let you designate exactly which charities get your $1.50 - others just put all the dough in their pool & divide it out.
I can tell you for a fact, though, that when the United Way rep comes in to make their pitch & says your company has 100% participation, there’s a good chance that’s total BS. I know that from way back when I was doing payroll for a company & knew for a fact not everyone was contributing, despite the rep’s claims.
At this point, I just give money directly to the charities & skip United Way.