AIDS group cancels fundraising marathons

For the past nine years, the Whitman-Walker clinic has partnered with Walk-The-Talk Productions, a Washington, DC based for-profit company, to hold fundraising marathons in several cities across the country.

While Whitman-Walker received all of the fundraising dollars, it had to pay for the hotel rooms, airline tickets, marketing and about a 4 percent fee to Walk-The-Talk. As costs increased over the years, the clinic ended up spending about 50 percent of the total amount raised.

Yesterday, the Examiner reported that the clinic has decided to cut ties with the company that organized the marathon and focus instead on the annual walk and other fundraising programs with a higher return on investment.

Although Whitman-Walker raised about $3 million in 2005 through the AIDS Marathon, expenses associated with the event meant the nonprofit only took home about half of that, said Kim Mills, Whitman-Walker’s director of communications.

Richard Zeichik, national director of the AIDS Marathon, said more than 10,000 runners raised about $25 million for Whitman-Walker Clinic over the past nine years, $14 million of which went directly to the nonprofit’s programs.

Regardless of the fundraising ratio... that's a lot of revenue to pass up.