Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Volunteers are key to a charity’s success.

Charities big and small rely on volunteers. At London Health Sciences Foundation, volunteers are the lifeblood of our organization.

For smaller charities, especially those starting out, volunteers are essential. For a small organization that needs to keep start-up costs down in order to grow successfully, volunteers can provide skill, knowledge and experience, a determined and passionate workforce, and act as a link into their community in order to raise awareness for the charity and its cause or beneficiary.

For larger or more mature charities that maintain an employee workforce to meet the daily demand and workload, volunteers remain equally as valuable. At our Foundation, they assist staff in increasing our efficiency, our effectiveness, and our overall success; and they are an indispensable link to the community as ambassadors and advocates for London Health Sciences Centre and its many programs.

According to an Imagine Canada Research Note on the 2010 Canada Survey of Giving conducted by Statistics Canada, more than 13.3 million Canadians volunteered about 2.1 billion hours of their time annually to charitable and volunteer organizations. That’s the equivalent of 1.1 million fulltime jobs. We know that LHSF and LHSC volunteers give thousands of hours of their time each and every year.

We work hard to attract, and even actively recruit, volunteers to our Foundation, but it is often our volunteers who are our most effective recruiters as they speak to their family, friends, neighbours and personal and business acquaintances about our organization and our hospital

Volunteers also tend to lead by example when it comes to giving with 91% of volunteers making charitable donations, compared to 73% of non-volunteers.

Our volunteers bring fresh ideas, insight and expertise that supplement and complement the knowledge and dedicated effort of our employees. The volunteers on our board and committees act as the community’s conscience, providing important guidance and oversight to our Foundation’s operations.

For our Foundation, volunteers bring passion and commitment to literally dozens of health care and patient care causes. They organize and hold about 100 community events each year and are key components in the Foundation’s signature events and other fundraising efforts. They help raise awareness and vital funds that keep our Hospital on the forward edge of medical research, education, innovation and patient care.

Quite simply, we couldn’t do it without them.

Dan Ross

For more on recruiting and managing volunteers who make a difference in your organization, visit Imagine Canada’s sector source pages. Imagine Canada’s Volunteer Value Calculator can assist you in measuring the economic contribution of volunteers. And be sure to check out the helpful resources available at Volunteer Canada too.

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

It’s rating season – busting the overhead myth

Reports on charities are made by watchdog groups and consumer magazines each year.

Some of these watchdogs are relative novices in evaluating the charity sector. They look for a simple way to judge charities and transmit that evaluation to the public. There are those that conclude that overhead cost ratio is one of, if not the single most, important factor by which charities should be judged effective.

It is not.

While the debate on how to best evaluate charities is relatively new in Canada, it has been raging in the USA for years. Experienced donor advisory groups that relied on the overhead cost ratio for years have started to abandon it in the face of methodical studies showing that too low a ratio actually points to charities being less efficient and less effective.

Unfortunately, the charity sector in Canada sends conflicting messages to the public on this issue. Some charities will not publicize their results from evaluations based on overhead cost ratios (even if they receive good ratings), some actively try to debunk the evaluations, but others actively promote their high marks as a reason to donate to their cause.

In the USA, three of the leading and most experienced independent charity watchdogs recently signed an open letter to the public, launched a website called The Overhead Myth and started a pledge petition on the site to get people to stop judging charities based solely or largely on overhead costs. These groups collectively advise millions of donors each year and they are now urging all donors to see the whole picture when evaluating charities.

Two Canadian organizations already evaluate charities based on good governance, transparency and other factors that, when part of a formalized structure and plan, help ensure that a charity can be effective. Imagine Canada and the Better Business Bureau have an accreditation process that evaluates charities on multiple points and they have review and complaint reporting procedures, so charities must take care to live up to those standards at all times.

To ensure public confidence and sector effectiveness, Canadian charities need to endorse these accreditation groups and should work to meet the standards that they have set. They also have to be open and accessible. Donors should be encouraged to contact their charity of choice, without hesitation, if they have any questions. As charities we must welcome their engagement and respond quickly and definitively.

Charities need to be effective and transparent. Those who rely on us deserve no less than our best.

Dan Ross

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Charity standards make a difference

In any industry or sector, establishing, meeting and maintaining standards is key to building public and investor confidence. Nowhere is that more important than the charity sector where wise donor investment can make an incredible difference to the communities in which we live and to society in general.

As a sector, we must voluntarily seek to meet standards that are over and above those set by government if we are to earn and keep public and donor confidence. We owe this to our beneficiaries if we are to meet their needs.

Imagine Canada’s Standards Program is a Canada-wide set of 72 externally established standards for charities and non-profits designed to demonstrate their compliance in five fundamental areas: board governance; financial accountability and transparency; fundraising; staff management; and volunteer involvement.

London Health Sciences Foundation is proud to be an early adopter of this national program, which is one of the first of its kind in the world. When Imagine Canada announced on June 19, the first group to meet all 72 standards since the program’s initial pilot, we were one of only 45 charities nationwide (and one of just four hospital foundations) to earn the right to display the Imagine Canada Trustmark.

The formal accreditation process truly helped us become better. We were already doing most or all of the things that were set as standards. However, formalizing those standards reinforced our Foundation’s already positive and effective fundraising and reporting procedures, ensuring that we continue to be accountable to our donors in a transparent manner.

Like the Better Business Bureau Accredited Charity seal, which we also proudly display, the Imagine Canada Trustmark is an easy way to visually identify a trusted charity. The numerous standards, reviews and complaints reporting procedures established by these organizations far outweigh the overhead cost ratio that is so popular with less comprehensive charity evaluators who use it as a single or main evaluation point.

Evaluations are important, but they must be detailed, accurate - and most importantly - a true reflection of the performance of a charitable organization.

We recommend that donors take advantage of Imagine Canada’s Charity Focus reports as a source of information when making their donation decisions. This service is endorsed by the Canada Revenue Agency’s Charities Directorate (the government agency responsible for registering and monitoring charities). Finally, the CRA itself maintains a public file on its website of the annual financial reports filed by charities.

Donors strengthen our communities and make the world a better place. Informed donors do that most effectively.

Dan Ross