KTKC: How Are Your Donations Used?

Throughout our first three years of Kilted to Kick Cancer, we acted as a proxy to raise research dollars for Prostate Cancer Foundation and LiveStrong.

And we did well at that, raising over $60,000 in only 90 days of active fundraising for those organizations. Yet, we found many who were reluctant to donate to large charities where the lion’s share of donations went to salaries and administrative overhead.

When we got our 501(c)3 designation, the promise we made ourselves, and our donors, was that we would funnel every possible penny we raised directly to our stated intent: cancer research.

We’d keep our administrative costs as low as possible, we’d rely on grassroots support and word-of-mouth advertising, and we’d carefully vet everyone to whom we awarded research dollars. Our board donates their time; all of us are unpaid. We conduct our board meetings via Skype. We pinch pennies. We perused Charity Watch very carefully to seek out those charities that donate the maximum of their donations to research.

And along the way, we decided that the best bang for our (your) bucks was to donate seed money for new and promising research. There are oodles of new and innovative research and treatment techniques out there that are starving for the money to get their research off the ground.

Enter Prostate Cancer Research and Education Foundation, which does just that. Kilted to Kick Cancer donated $13,000 to help fund those studies, a full 86% of our 2014 fundraising totals.

Go read what they’re doing with your donations.

It’s pretty cool.