Agency Selection / Funding Process

Each year, agencies applying for United Way funding must complete applications and interviews as part of a comprehensive allocation process.

The applications and accompanying multi-year budgets, IRS 990s, and audited financial statements are reviewed by teams of community volunteers who identify questions unanswered by the documentation or areas of potential concern. They then meet with Board and Staff members from their assigned agencies to ask questions and decide how each agency’s request answers the following questions:

1. Is the service provided vital to this community?

With limited resources and significant needs, it makes sense to fund programs that will make an immediate impact on individuals and families and/or result in a long-term impact on the community as a whole.

2. Is the service being provided efficiently?

Using budgets, IRS documents, and audited financial statements, the teams review how agencies used their resources in the previous two years as well as how they plan to use them in the coming year to determine the efficiency of each operation.

3. Is the service effective?

Good people and good intentions are just not good enough. All good investments provide returns, and in the case of non-profits, those returns are in the form of lives improved and lives saved. To prove that the services they provide are effective, agencies provide measurable and documentable outcomes that they have achieved over the past year and set outcome goals for the next.

Following their agency visits, the allocation teams meet again to develop their recommendations for funding. Team Captains then meet for one last time to present those recommendations and negotiate the final allocations based on the amount available to distribute.

If you would like to be a member of an Allocation Team, please contact us.