How can a prestigious, established and well-known entity like the Catholic Relief Services be denied participation in the United Charity Miles Program????

I've been working with Richard Balmadier at CRS to have them gain participation so I and others can donate miles to them, yet they received the run around for months and the a form letter denial?!!

1KVoice - could you chime in please?

"Sent: Thursday, March 06, 2014 10:40 PM
To: Balmadier, Richard
Subject: United Airlines Grant Proposal

Dear Richard

Thank you for requesting United Airlines� support. We applaud your involvement with your community and work to support Catholic Relief Services - USCCB.

As you can probably imagine, United receives numerous requests for assistance, sponsorship, and/or donations from a wide variety of worthwhile organizations. We regret that United will be not able to provide assistance for this organization.

We commend your community service and wish Catholic Relief Services - USCCB every success in the future.

Very best regards,

Corporate and Community Affairs
United Airlines


CG/JMAIL/40268369"

Just what everyone loves, a public pressure campaign!

There are thousands of charities in existence, and no company can support all of them. You are free to support whomever you choose, just as United is.

Sure there are thousands upon thousands of charities, but I'd suggest that there are a few charities of the stature, global reach, efficiency and compelling mission as CRS ... They are on par with the American Red Cross, Medicins Sans Frontiers, etc... on essentially all dimensions

What criteria does United use in accepting or rejecting charities for this program?

In your opinion.

Only United can answer that, and I guarantee they won't.

According to wiki (so to be taken with a grain of salt) CRS has a turnover of $900m against American Red Cross's $3.5bn. Also 5k employees vs 30k employees. That said I don't see why UA wouldn't have a fairly wide range of charities that M+ could donate to, it doesn't seem CRS is exactly niche.

Maybe because UA want to remain a secular organization and CRS is a religious-affiliated non-profit. Regardless of the great work they do, that may be a reason for UA not to add them to the list of charities they partner with.

They do have the Salvation Army on the list...

It's a much shorter list than I expected though, perhaps they just limit numbers.

Could you direct me to "the list"

While this clearly is difficult for you to fathom I'm simply happy this isn't a new name for MileagePlus for the 2015 campaign.

Here

CRS is quite often on the list at emiles, so you could donate there and then transfer the emiles to Mileage Plus.

How would that work? ... from my cursory look, e-miles.com seems to be a miles for spam service ... where could I donate miles to CRS using this process?

It's not donating miles. The only thing you can do through them is donate money and get miles in return. I think nanook misunderstood your request.