It's less than half of what had been raised at this time last year. However, I do know that a couple of our largest contributors were in last year's total that still are not in (this) year's total, but even if they were we're still way behind.
We would encourage every business out there that is willing, to allow a United Way representative or volunteer to make a presentation to the company's employees.
This is our opportunity to stand out and create a preference for BB&T in the marketplace.
We just plan to survey some of our larger contributors and find out their suggestions on how we can make the process and the campaign more successful and we invite their feedback.
There were some bright spots. We did have some companies who increased from last year, but we had far more whose total donations were down.
It's still disappointing, but considering BRAC, hurricane relief and the publicity generated by the Coalition (for Change), we feel we did the best we could. We knew reaching the goal was going to be a virtual impossibility given what we were seeing early on.
We're pretty pessimistic at this point that we will come anywhere close to the goal. But we are going to keep the campaign open through the end of February at a minimum. It may extend beyond that. We're doing an assessment of where we are with some of our significant donors.
We did end up raising a little more than we were actually anticipating. As a result of that we will have to use less of the reserves than we had previously thought we would. So there is at least a little bright side.
