ALS Ice Bucket Challenge Funding Leads To New Genetic Findings (yahoo.com) 33
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers are crediting the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, a fundraiser for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis that went viral in 2014, for funding a new study that has possibly identified a common gene that contributes to the nervous system disease. Yahoo reports via Good Morning America: "In a study published in The Nature Genetics Journal, researchers from various institutions, including the University of Massachusetts Medical School and the University Medical Center Utrecht, identified the gene NEK1 as a common gene that could have an impact on who develops the disease. Variants of the gene appear to lead to increased risk of developing ALS, according to preliminary findings. Researchers in 11 countries studied 1,000 families in which a family member developed ALS and conducted a genome-wide search for any signs that a gene could be leading to increased ALS risk. After identifying the NEK1 gene, they also analyzed 13,000 individuals who had developed ALS despite no family history and found they had variants in that same gene, again linking that gene with increased ALS risk. Starting in the summer of 2014, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge led to 17 million videos made and $220 million raised, according to the ALS Association -- $115 million of which went to the association."
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I never knew the ice bucket challenge had a goal. To me it was just an annoying thing that kept getting directed toward me. I've never seen one of the videos. I assumed it was something like the cinnamon challenge.
Glad is was fruitful.
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Prostate jokes are not funny.
Now get offa my lawn!
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Prostate jokes are not funny. Now get offa my lawn!
Yeah, that really pissed me off, too. Granted, at my age, getting pissed off takes a full minute just to get started. But I make up for it in frequency.
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That's what would locally be called a "dribble joke", one that comes slowly, bit by bit. But I think I'll have to let it sink in.
Post below if you did it... (Score:2)
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Re:Wait... Who got that other half of the $$$ rais (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wait... Who got that other half of the $$$ rais (Score:5, Informative)
I spent about fifteen years of my career in the non-profit sector, so I have some perspective on this.
Raising money in a non-profit is just like selling stuff is for a for-profit. Generating gross revenue is relatively easy -- if you spend a lot of money you can rake in a lot of dough. What's a bitch to generate is net profit. In the non-profit sector we don't use the term "profitability" very much, so the metric that's often used to describe financial is "cost to raise a dollar." For typical fundraising activities cost-to-raise-a-dollar runs from 0.25 to 1.5 dollars/dollar.
Take junk mail. The cost to raise a dollar for a well-run direct mail campaign is in the range of $1.25 to $1.50, so if I want to raise $115,000 to spend on other things I have to scale my direct mail campaign to bring inover $258,000 gross. As you can see I chose a net target that was exactly 1/1000 the size of the ALS bucket challenge net, so you can compare the efficiency of the processes readily. The cost to raise a dollar for the ALS bucket challenge is actually better than a well-run direct mail campaign -- $0.91.
And it should be more efficient than direct mail, because direct mail is about the least efficient method there is. The marginal costs are huge because you pay for the names and addresses as well as printing and mailing of each piece, and most of those pieces will end up in the landfill unopened. So if direct mail is so inefficient, why use it? Because the financial inefficiency doesn't matter to the organization doing the fundraising. The end result of my hypothetical direct mail campaign is that my organization has $115,000 it didn't have before. That probably pays for one and half full time staff positions (at the low do-gooder wages we pay) for a year.
So the ALS challenge was in the financial efficiency range of methods normally used by non-profits, albeit a little towards the inefficient end. That doesn't really tell us if the campaign was responsibly run or not; to know that you'd have to look at all the expenses and compare those to costs in other viral Internet fundraising campaigns. But the bottom line is that the ALS association ended up with $115 million it didn't have before.
Can you think of a way of raising $115 million in a few months? I thought not. So presuming the guys who ran the campaign didn't spend the money on hookers and blow, I wouldn't be unduly concerned by a cost-to-raise-a-dollar of $0.91 if I was on the board.
Should donors care that the ALS challenge was a little high on the cost-to-raise-a-dollar metric? Well, I look at it this way. People did it because it was fun and for a good cause, and two years later we can point to concrete and significant scientific results from the money raised. That's not only pretty good, it's pretty damned awesome.
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People did it because it was fun and for a good cause, and two years later we can point to concrete and significant scientific results from the money raised. That's not only pretty good, it's pretty damned awesome.
Downright spectacular, I would think. How many thousands of cancer fundraisers have their been, with precious little to show for it?
Maybe they should start having anti-cancer fundraisers...
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Wait a minute... Wouldn't they be better off not spending the $1.25 - $1.50 it takes to raise a net $1? They can spend that directly on the staff positions and what-not. Am I missing something here?
Yes, you are missing pretty much everything. If $1.50 goes out and $2.50 comes in, you net $1.00. If you just spend the $1.50, you net -$1.50.
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"Should donors care that the ALS challenge was a little high on the cost-to-raise-a-dollar metric? Well, I look at it this way. People did it because it was fun and for a good cause, and two years later we can point to concrete and significant scientific results from the money raised. That's not only pretty good, it's pretty damned awesome."
Don't let the otherwise informative post persuade you, donors should always care about the overhead costs of the charities they support. Just because an activity is "fu
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True, donors should be concerned -- but they need to exercise that concern in the context of comparable activities.
It's hard to raise a hundred million bucks. Hard == expensive == less efficient. So efficiency is a concern, but it shouldn't necessarily be a paramount one, because if it is that pretty much limits you to problems that can be solved by small quantities of money. Buying a cup of coffee for a homeless person is perfectly efficient, unlike building affordable housing which necessarily involv
- Michael Scott (Score:2, Insightful)
Yahoo reports via Good Morning America: "In a study published in The Nature Genetics Journal,
How about a quote directly from those involved in the study. I've seen Yahoo and I've watched GMA and who knows how many time telephone got screwed up in that news path.
Kind of... (Score:3)
To suggest the Ice Bucket Challenge funding was directly responsible for the results completely ignores how the funding of these kind of scientific endeavours really works.
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It also ignores the fact that the Ice Bucket Challenge missed the point and created blind slacktivism more than anything else.
Remember it was donate OR get ice bucketed. All the youtube idiots did it wrong. One of the few who did it right was Patrick Stewart on his ice bucket challenge video.
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A misplaced quote ate the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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A lot of things are observable from the Ice Bucket Challenge.
First: ALS affects a tiny, tiny fraction of the population. 36,000 people worldwide. Diverting resources to ALS diverts those resources away from efforts which affect hundreds of millions of people. That means you get to pat your back for pulling bread from 10,000 starving childrens's mouths to feed ONE starving child somewhere a few miles away instead. (Okay, that's not the right metaphor; it's more like you diverted the truck to another s
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A lot of things are observable from your post.
First: You assume that every dollar donated to ALS was therefore not donated to some other charity. This is quite a silly assumption.
Second: You don't seem to understand how progress is made. You see, someone finds some thing that not earth shattering in and of itself, and adds that to other small things discovered by other people. This adds up to big things, like the computer you are using (and almost every other thing in your life). If we ignored all the s