Christmas is a Time of Year when People Think About Giving to Charities
Charities always have and always will exist but many people don’t think much about them until around Christmas time. Christmas is a time when people get in a charitable mood, and since Christmas is the season for giving, people are more inclined to give to a charity at this time of year. Since Christmas also coincides with the end of the year when people are thinking about their taxes and where they might want to give in order to be able to claim charitable giving, they are more open to considering giving to charities at this time.
Charities seem to be aware of that, and use this opportunity to make the public aware of their needs. Of course these charities need sustainable income throughout the whole year, but because giving is not consistent throughout the year, they tend to capitalize on the opportunity and the charitable spirit of giving that seems to exist in the hearts of all people around the holidays. The problem most of us encounter when considering giving to charity is being able to determine which charities are legitimate and which ones are scams. Unfortunately, there are many scams out there. There are many organizations who label themselves with a name that is so similar to a legitimate organization that they lead many people astray who don’t take the time to do research on the company requesting donations.
But the way to make sure that you’re not giving the organization, which is more or less set up to support themselves rather than the clause, there are a couple of things you can do. I have learned to request them to give me the name and website address of their organization and then I’ll go look them up online and I’ll look up reviews regarding them.
Often I find out that most of the funds go towards fund-raising and very little actually goes for their cause. I’ll ask the telemarketer to give me their information and then to call me back the next day after I’ve had an opportunity to do some research. I say to them,” I’m sure you understand that I feel it’s important to research where I’m putting my money to make sure that it is indeed going to a good cause.” How can they say no to that? Most of these organizations do not call me back. So then I don’t have to deal with it. And that tells me something about the organization, don’t you think – if they don’t even call me back?
Another thing you can do is to ask them to call you back the next day after you had a chance to research the organization, and then go to this website, Charity Navigator and type in the name of the charity and you can see where all the money goes that they collect. This is a objective website that will give you honest information.
We finally decided to pick one charity to support which we knew were extremely good stewards of the money they collected and put almost 100% put towards their cause. Of course they have to pay some staffing, but we are subsidizing a home which gives the opportunity for parents to drop their children with disabilities off for a day, an overnight, and even occasionally even a weekend so that they can reconnect with their spouse, and other children who might be their attention.
It gives them an opportunity to eat a nice quiet uninterrupted dinner and even have an uninterrupted night sleep and reconnect with their other children who have to take second place because the child with disabilities requires so much attention. It’s called Jill’s House and if you’re looking for a place to contribute at the end of the year, I know they need all the donations they can get in order to consistently be able to give these parents an occasional respite. As you can imagine, it’s very expensive to leave the child there. That’s why they need some outside help for these parents be able to afford it.
What some people do is to give a certain amount every month instead of just a lump sum at the end of the year and that contributes to one or two children being able to stay there every month. It really is a great cause. So many marriages of children with disabilities don’t make it because of all the added stress. This respite center can actually contribute to saving marriages. We believe it’s a great cause and are so happy they were able to contribute to that each year.
Jill's House
If you ever wanted to help set up a fund raising activity to help raise money for a charity, you could always set up a campaign to sell Christmas cards and use the proceeds to fund your charitable giving. You could start in September and sell all the way up to the week or so before Christmas and be able to raise quite a bit during that time. If you ever want to know how to do that, just give us a call and we can help you with that.
You can find out more about Jill’s House on our Charity page. At the bottom of this post is a link to a video that tells all about it. It’s located in Northern VA where we are and I don’t think there is anything else like it anywhere.
JillsHouse
