More than 400 Baton Rouge area businesses, schools and nonprofit organizations collectively contributed more than $9.4 million to the Capital Area United Way’s annual workforce fundraising campaign.
The $9,444,738 total surpassed the $9.3 million goal the CAUW had set for this year’s campaign, the organization announced this morning, and it marks a 4% increase over fundraising during last year’s campaign. The fundraising campaign ran between June and December of last year.
“This team delivered,” says Stephen Toups, CAUW board member and Turner Industries vice president, in a prepared statement. “The success of this year’s campaign came down to us making a commitment to engage as many donors as we could and allow them to be part of the solution by contributing to United Way.”
ExxonMobil was once again the top contributor to this year’s campaign, with $1.4 million in total contributions from employees and the company, followed by Turner Industries Group, Dow Chemical Company, Motiva Enterprises, CB&I, Entergy River Bend Station, Shell Chemical Company, Jacobs Engineering Group, BASF Corp. and The Mosaic Company.
Ralph Bender, incoming CAUW board chair, says the organization is “on the right track for even bigger totals for the 2015 workforce campaign,” which is set to begin June 1.
CAUW CEO Darrin Goss recently told Daily Report the agency’s overhead costs are continuing to decrease. CAUW’s overhead in fiscal year 2014-15 will drop to below 21% from 23% in FY 2013-14. While that’s still significantly higher than the national benchmark of 15%, Goss is confident the agency will be able to reduce its overhead to between 10% and 13% within the next three years.
