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Originally Posted by Fan in Exile
I think that is a more likely explanation. Not sure what other charity events the Flames put out beside the golf and poker tournament but those PR events return little on the dollar. I guess we don't know about the 50/50 draw but hopefully it's much better since there's very little overhead involved.
In any event, do you think this conclusion reflects much better on the Flames? PK Subban put up 10 million of his own money for the Children's Hospital in Montreal and does fundraising on top of that. The Flames contribute 30% of what they collect in PR events, put up none of their own money and have an $8m reserve. Colour me unimpressed.
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I think people need to draw a line between the Flames organization and it's ownership, and the Flames Foundation and it's role.
Flames Foundation is a pretty small group of workers that likely has 3 main objectives: Manage 50/50 and coordinate donations for that, Run the two main events the foundation hosts each year (Poker Tournament & Golf Tournament), and manage the relationship with the partners/charities.
To completely remove 65% of the revenue that team gets, and then call that group inefficient is likely unfair. Sure the two big events are probably inefficient but that ignores the fact that those are more PR events than anything, and also ignores the good that comes out of 50/50.
Based on the salary numbers in those tax returns their are likely 2-3 people on that staff who likely feel like #### today as they see the organization they manage got dragged through the mud because the article decided to only tell half the story.
I have actually never met Candice Goudie or any employees from the Flames foundation but others in my company have dealt with them and have said nothing but great things about them. Sure it's easy to rake the Flames owners through the coals but I can guarantee you that the people actually impacted by this fire today have nothing to do with that and feel like crap from this whole thing.
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Originally Posted by Oling_Roachinen
The issue with counting the 50/50 though and comparing it to other charities is that outside of other sporting foundations (to which the Flames were compared to under the same criteria) is that no other charity exist where 65% of their revenue is passive. 99% of people "donating" to the 50/50 aren't doing it for the donation privilege, they are doing it to win the 50/50. Sure, as a 50/50 buyer, knowing it goes to charity leads me to talk myself into buying a couple tickets (and note the word buy). But really if the 50/50 had no chance of winning, no one's supporting it. It's a nice perk for a foundation to be able to cover most of their revenue stream passively off the back of drinking sports fans.
While it was a fallacy to omit it without explicitly stating so, I mean it's a pretty fair argument. Enough so that they should compare the results to charities in similar situations...like other sporting foundations. Oh wait, that's what it did.
The issue is they made 2.4M passively, another 1.7M through "charity events" and yet 1.7M made it out as gifts to qualified donees that year. That's a pretty poor stat line, even if they were able to bank 1.3M for the bloated reserve.
And again, even without the reserve, even with the 50/50, the total gifts to qualified donees in 2017 was 58%. That needs an explanation, otherwise it's pretty despicable.
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At the same time I think you could argue that the Flames Foundation doesn't actually do any active fundraising through Charity Events.
50/50 not an active fundraiser through charity events.
The golf tournament / poker tournaments may be seen as a charity event - but your same point on 50/50 applies - those tickets are "bought" to attend that event, people are not donating money to charity and then thinking they get to go to an event.
So really maybe they shouldn't be compared to other charitable organizations. I've never seen the Flames Foundation going door to door to ask for donations, or having little toonie/loonie drop boxes at various places like other charities.
Really their role is as a passive foundation that distributes the funds from 50/50 and holds a couple of events. Probably not fair to compare them to other massive organizations that do a lot of active fundraising - even though the total revenue is similar (although it's not similar if you remove 50/50.