Or in general, how frequently do some charities get far more funding than others that might be in more dire need of funds and able to do more good with the money? How often do people making donations consider this? There’s plenty of research you could do before deciding where to send your money, as websites like Charity Navigator help support. Like small purchases, I think people aren’t likely to research small donations they make. Not that it should deter anyone from giving.
Before looking at the numbers, I think Child’s Play is a wonderful idea and I’m sure the program has brought joy to thousands of kids. I’ve given a bit myself too in the past. But of all the causes out there gamers can give to, has this one gotten a bit too big a share of the generosity? It’s amazing what gamers have accomplished with this cause, what can we do with another one? Especially seeing the explosive growth in donations towards Child’s play in recent years.
This recent Kotaku article quotes the “lifetime earnings” at $10 million. In 2010 the donations totaled 2.3 million, double their goal bar that appears on the Child’s Play main page. Wikipedia totals revenue so far at $9 million. Child’s play’s website quotes 2-3% of revenue has to be spent on shipping/etc administrative costs to get the goods to the kids. So that leaves ~$8,775,000 since 2003 and $2.25m in 2010. Remember, here I’m only looking at numbers for *one* of the many charities that in some way benefits hospitalized children (in this case, targeted towards getting them games to play during the hospital stay). Children’s charities are quite popular.
Let’s do some back of the envelope calculations with U.S Department of Health and Human Services data to see if Child’s Play is funded well beyond what they’d need to cover games for kids with that amount of funding and the enormous growth in donations in the past few years. It’s a sad thing that there are sick kids out there, but thankfully there aren’t very many in hospitals at any one time. There’s only a finite amount of money needed to get them all plenty of games to play, and it’s really not that much.
Figure 3. Percentage of Children's Hospital Stays, by Age Group
Figure 18. Length of Hospitalization, Pediatric Subgroups
Babies don’t really play video games, so what we’re really looking at as far as number of sick kids needing hospital stays are the pediatric illness numbers. But more specifically, we can use the 6-12 and 13-17 age bracket percentages of children’s hospital stays as the ones who’d be playing video games, giving us 1.2 million stays for gaming-age kids (and even teens included!). This is for 2000, and the total US population has grown 9.7% since then according to the 2010 census. Let’s just approximate that the child population grew by that percentage too and along with it, their hospital visits. Using that and what we see in that charts that’s about 4.7 million patient-stay-days for game playing age group kids estimated for 2010. So on average, that’s about 13,000 hospitalized kids per day in the US that could use some games to play.
So that means as a kid in a hospital in the US, you thus far have access to ~$686 worth of gaming goodness from Child’s Play alone. So every kid could have access to his or her own personal Wii and about a dozen games depending on what’s paid for them in additional to any portable gaming system they brought with them. I’m guessing many of these games are purchased at a nice discount too. From the Child’s Play website it sounds like the hospitals keep a library of games kids can check games out from, so with that in mind they have tons to choose from now. Also, some kids could probably play multiplayer games together so a console-per-child might be more than are needed. They surely aren’t utilized 100% of the time during the stay either. Not every kid plays games all the time as much as kids love games, right?
The Child’s Play website mentions that some kids get to take games home as presents, which is nice. But then again, should that just be targeted at lower income kids who might not have plenty of games at home and family/friends very able to buy gifts for their sick kid rather than any kids being discharged from one of the participating hospitals?
The Wikipedia article on child’s play mentions this though:
“100% of all donations are distributed to the hospitals, paying for pediatric research, facility improvements, etc.”
So, perhaps once the games are covered, which is probably pretty quickly, the remaining money is not exactly going to waste according to this. Though this means that if you thought your money was paying for games for a sick kid, that’s not entirely true. Still great for the hospitals to use the extra money for anything they want, but I think most folks giving assume they’re buying actual games the kids will be playing. Maybe further research in deciding where to send your donation could involve seeing how well funded these hospitals are overall, not just for games. 5% of the visits were uninsured, so you might decide to look at charities that help those folks out as one direction to go in. One way to look at this is as a good way to bring in a nice chunk of change for various causes that benefit the kids with one part of that being games to play, even if that’s what most people think it is when they think of Child’s Play.
Taking a quick look at one children’s hospital’s funding, St. Jude’s Children’s Research hospital is a non-profit one where even parents who cannot pay do not have to, the hospital’s funding covers the uninsured. According to Charity Navigator, in 2009 they had an extra $41.2 million excess left over after covering all of their expenses. That’s 18 times Child’s Play’s total revenue in 2010 from a single hospital’s funding to put things in perspective. That’s just one hospital, but if they’re all that well funded you might be able to find a cause that needs your money more. Another thing to remember is medicaid/medicare are federal programs that you fund if you pay taxes, so that’s covering a lot. I’m sure there’s a lot of state programs too.
Time to make a note here, huge success? In participating hospitals in the US, it looks like the kids would by now have access to all the games they could want. The Child’s Play website mentions branching out into more hospitals in the world, though it’s mostly been US-based so far I believe.
There are a handful in other countries with Child’s Play hospitals. But there are only ~70 participating hospitals that receive their donated goods right now; maybe the best way to help is to just get more hospitals in the program? If every children’s hospital stay in the US gets some funding though, that’s still quite a lot to go around per kid. This Wikipedia article alone lists 126 US-based children’s hospitals. So if Child’s Play covers half of those as the numbers suggest, that would mean each kid has access to a treasure trove of $1372 per visiting kid worth of gaming goodness. That’s enough for every kid to have his/her own personal use of all three current gen consoles and games for each. Wow! It’s safe to guess most of the money by now must be going towards facilities/pediatric research/etc. Most children’s hospitals are non-profits, perhaps the ones outside of the program have plenty of other charity funding and already felt they’d purchased enough games for kids to play on their own. Then again, that’s just a guess.
Annualized might be a better way to look at this, so the $2.3 million in 2010 is about $180 bucks a year per kid, $360 just looking at participating hospitals. Discs eventually get scratched beyond repair and things break, as well as new systems and games coming out, so of course continued funding for games themselves isn’t a waste. But this is a lot for how much strictly game funding per kid is needed though. I don’t even spend that much in a year on games myself to last me all year, let alone a week or two in a hospital out of the year.
But if gamers start another charity organization, what should it be for? Perhaps we could do something related to games in education. So many schools are woefully hurting for funds, right? Maybe set up some programs that teach kids math through game development to make it fun. What about giving Wiis to retirement homes? That’s just a couple ideas though, what do you think the next gamer charity should be? Or are there some good lesser known ones that need the exposure Child’s Play has received?
But don’t forget, this post isn’t to make anyone not want to give, but mostly to encourage thinking about where you feel your donation will do the most good.
