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Thank you for your questions - we spend about 30% on overhead and 60% on postage and items for the care packages. The overhead includes everything from advertising, staff, rent, bills, travel costs, and storage. Care packages and the items in them take an enormous amount of room and we need a large space to fit all the stuff for the volunteers and give them room to actually work and pack the boxes up. Then we need some space to store them temporarily before they can get shipped. Also bear in mind that 30% encompasses the cost of producing Troopathon every year, which is an enormous and expensive event. We hire professional directors and sound and stage crew, and they all work for bare minimum so I feel we are lucky to get away with only 30% overhead costs. This is just as efficient as many of the other non-profits out there.
On the subject of photos - yes we use stock photos and stuff gathered from all around the web, but we have NEVER misrepresented them as our own or claimed that we took them on our own. There may be some individuals who make that link in their own mind, but I think the vast majority of intelligent people will read our emails and realize that we simply use the images to support the story and give the reader a feel for what they are reading about. Most of the stories we post about are directly quoted from news articles and we always include the name and date of the article. Most of the time we use the same image from the news articles too but sometimes I will go google a different picture if I don’t like the one that Fox or NBC used.
Never did we claim that another image was evidence of our own operations. the only time we explicitly state that an image was “us” were in images of our own volunteers packing or shipping boxes, or images of our own staff in Iraq, for example.
On the issue of the wounded soldier - this was one incident and yes we used it. It’s very simple...we saw an article published from a well known news source (i don’t remember specifically if it was Fox or someone else) that was written about a soldier who was disabled but still risked his own life to help a family whose car had run off the road during a snow storm. We showcased it in an email to simply say look here is a great example of one of our troops who is still a hero even after he’s sacrificed so much. we NEVER implied that the soldier in question had endorsed our group.
We never said anything about him that wasn’t already publicly published by the news. Nevertheless the family was upset about it and we pulled the article off our website at their request. We did this out of compassion for the family but not because we felt we had done anything wrong. All we did was bring attention to a story that was already published and available for everyone to read. I do not see how that impeaches our reputation as an organization.