Keeping the Fundraising Efforts Going

Project Valour IT's annual fundraising drive may be officially over, but we've fallen short of the goals set forth at the outset. We're not quite sure why that happened, but I'm going to maintain the links on my sidebar until the goal is met.

Holly Aho reports the following:

The next is that last night for most of the evening Soldiers' Angels' web server was down, due to a traffic accident that downed power lines nearby. So, for the final night of the fundraiser, no one was able to donate! There's no official extension that I'm aware of for the fundraiser, but I for one intend to keep the donation button on the side of my blog until the goal is met. Period. I encourage each of you to do the same if you feel it's appropriate.

It's a terrible shame, the number of fluke/freak accidents and series of unrelated events that have conspired to make this fundraiser much less successful than in previous years, but it is my hope that with good information and determination, that can change. I do not want our heroes to receive less support because Soldiers Angels has less resources to meet their needs. I hope you'll feel the same.

It may be possible that one reason for coming up short may be an ABC News report that found that quite a few charities focusing on American veterans did quite poorly. Soldiers Angel received a D from AIP, the group cited by ABC News.

One of my readers had commented to me via email of this situation and I passed it along to Holly and the crew at Soldiers Angel. Holly wrote a lengthy response on her blog, and let's just say that a the story has a few holes in it.

For starters, the ratings given by AIP are nothing more than the organization's opinion. Yet, ABC News felt that it could go ahead and write that report based on this organization's ratings. Nice. Classy.

Soldiers Angels' financial records are available online. It would be quite distressing if this year's fundraising efforts were sapped because of a shoddy piece of journalism.