FAQ for Choose Your Impact
What is Chooseyourimpact.org?
Choose Your Impact is an online action center for people looking to make a difference in the communities of Massachusetts. We believe that underneath everything we are, underneath everything we do, we are all people, connected, interdependent, and united -- and that through simple actions, no matter what form, we can each have an indelible impact on the future of our region and the people within it. Choose giving. Choose advocacy. Choose volunteering. Just choose to take action, and in doing so, you’ll help the urgent needs of today and build a stronger tomorrow.
Through Choose Your Impact you’ll have the option to pick from a number of featured causes to advance. If you choose to give, you’ll be given the opportunity to either help an urgent need today or invest in lasting solutions to strengthen tomorrow. You can also lend your time or voice to advance the cause you’ve selected.
Personalizing a Cause
In addition Choose Your Impact enables you to personalize a cause. Feel strongly about lowering the achievement gap? Want to use your birthday as a way to make progress against family homelessness? You can create a personalized impact page to be the headquarters for your campaign. Or join others’ campaigns: You can help New England Patriot Gerard Mayo increase youth opportunities, or First Lady Diane Patrick work to advance family financial stability. Whatever your decision, we hope you’ll join the movement to advance the common good in the Commonwealth.
How is Choose Your Impact different from other online giving sites?
Choose Your Impact gives you a full portfolio of options on both how you can make a difference and what you’d like to impact. Match volunteerism with Increasing Youth Opportunities, Choose to match your donation to provide a local family with basic needs with a long-term investment in family financial stability. In addition, by coupling short-term needs (help today) with long-term investments in agencies’ capacity to solve issues (strength tomorrow), Choose Your Impact helps you to prevent future problems in addition to responding to immediate needs.
What does it mean to Help Today?
Contributions through the Help Today screen will be invested into United Way programs that address the needs listed. If you donate to help match a young person with a mentor, your contributions will go to support a high-quality mentoring program so that more youth can come off the waiting list for mentors. The suggested donation is the standard cost associated with such an impact and includes things like mentor training, matching administrative costs and volunteer outreach for mentors. If you have questions about any of the help today areas, feel free to submit them here.
What does it mean to Strengthen Tomorrow?
Donating through Strength Tomorrow will help United Way advance a strategy toward ensuring that children enter school ready to learn, youth stay engaged in school and graduate with options for success, and families are financially stable. United Way is one of the only organizations in Massachusetts that provides operating support to its partner agencies and attaches that support to measurable outcomes. Operating support builds the capacity of organizations to plan for the future, build long-term strategies for progress and improve infrastructure and quality of staff. A 2008 New York Times Article pointed to three studies which showed that this kind of investment often “yielded better results” than project-based donations.
What is United Way of Massachusetts Bay & Merrimack Valley’s “overhead” rate?
For non-profit organizations, "overhead" consists of fundraising and administration expenses that represent the cost of doing business. According to the Better Business Bureau/Wise Giving Alliance standards, a non-profit organization's total fund raising and administration should be no more than 35% of total revenue. United Way of Massachusetts Bay and Merrimack Valley’s current overhead is 17%.
