Make A Wish Foundation

     I chose to profile the Make-A-Wish foundation for this discussion.  They have an interesting model compared to other NPOs in that they spend their money not on research or treatment for the disease their recipients suffer from, but on granting one-off experiences that their beneficiaries want.  To start their social media presence and website are incredibly well maintained.  The donation page lets people get very specific with their money, deciding whether it goes nationally, to a specific local chapter of the organization, or internationally. I think that's a great idea for an organization that is structured in their manner, and similar NPOs could utilize this formula.  They do however suffer from several problems relating to their donation campaigns.
    The first article linked below describes how they suffer from complaints about fraudulent copy-cat organizations.  Kid's Wish Network plays off of the generic sounding name and solicits donations from people while only putting about 1% of the money to use on children, while utilizing outside for profit businesses to funnel money back to individuals in the company.  Make-A-Wish receives lots of complaints from potential donors about the misuse of their money by these copy-cats, and while they are not at fault they do have to address this sort of thing and try to appease potential donors.  The second article linked below has some interesting figures for where Make-A-Wish's donations go.  While they do maintain an acceptable ratio of donations to applying them to children, they come under fire here for the amounts they spend.  The article claims that the average wish costs over 15,000$.  Anyone can see that when the majority of wishes are disney trips that this figure seems inflated.  It begs the question of how many more children could they be helping, or whether there is an objectionable disparity in some instances.



www.cnn.com/2013/06/13/us/worst-charities/


lesswrong.com/lw/37f/efficient_charity/