My only interaction with UW in Spokane has been through their volunteer portal. www.volunteerspokane.org This UW portal offers a one-stop dashboard for people who want to volunteer (anywhere in the region, not with UW specifically) to hook up with nonprofits/charities that need volunteers. A lot of local orgs use this portal for outreach and volunteer communications.
I’ve no idea if the local orgs are now going to get cut off from that service or if the national UW will keep it running and maintained. If the local orgs lose access it’s going to cause a lot of pain I think - not many of them are going to have the IT skills available to replicate it or to migrate to a different volunteer platform and even if they did it will cost them money.
darkmarx@lemmy.world 2 days ago
They are a middleman and do take a slight overhead, 1.1% last I saw, but it might have changed since then. The benefit is one of simplicity. Many people want to give to charity and aren’t sure which one. UW let’s them donate one place and it get distributed to many. They also have criteria that charities must meet to qualify. Also, like you mentioned, they do the paycheck deduction. All of what they do is about making it easier and hassle free as possible to donate, making it more likely that people will.