United Way of Summit County Donor Choice Program

In keeping with our mission to improve lives by mobilizing community assets for health and human services and to allow our donors to fulfill their philanthropic intentions, we offer the following options.

• Our donor choice program is comprehensive, allowing designations to other United Ways, affiliated agencies, non-affiliated agencies, three impact areas, and exclusion of any affiliated agency from receiving any portion of a donor’s contribution.
   
• A donor can designate a portion or the full amount of his/her contribution to eligible organizations. Eligibility for designations requires an organization to be providing health and human services and qualified as an IRS 501c3 organization, attest to their compliance with the anti-terrorism requirements, and must provide banking information to expedite direct deposit of quarterly payments of designations.
   
• United Way of Summit County has a “no promotion” policy that prohibits any organization from asking or encouraging donors to designate to them.
   
• Designations to an agency are unrestricted as to their use by the agency; they are not subject to specific program application and are not reviewed as part of United Way’s Community Investment process.
   
• Designations to Impact Areas are allocated back to affiliated agency programs within the impact area; they enable our investment teams to apply additional funding to programs that need and merit more funding, but this funding may not be repeated in subsequent years.
   
• Donor requests to exclude a United Way Affiliated Agency from receiving any of their contribution are honored by distributing the contribution to every other affiliated agency other than the one excluded, over and above any other funding they receive; this allows a donor to support community services at all other United Way affiliated agencies other than the one he/she does not want to support.
   
• Every dollar that is designated reduces the Community Investment pool and reduces the funding we can apply to programs that meet the greatest identified needs in our community and produce measurable results and outcomes.
   
• United Way of Summit County charges no processing or administrative fees for donor designations and remits the full amount collected to the specified organization.  
   
• The amount of designations paid by payroll deduction is based on company collection experience; employers do not release individual payroll deduction payment information to us.