What are the key differences between the two organizations?

This could get good.

Watching from the duck blind on this

DU is about persona. They do some good work, but a lot of money goes to salaries and infrastructure. Delta is a complete 180 from that. Low employee numbers, huge amounts of constant research and the majority of their money going back into and onto conservation and birds

http://www.deltawaterfowl.org/about/

According to the handy pie chart at that link: 83% of funding goes to ducks and duck hunters; 16% goes to fundraising; 1% goes to management and general.

http://www.ducks.org/media/_global/_documents/stateFactSheets/NationalFactSheet.pdf

According to DU's handy chart, 82% goes to conservation and education; 15% goes to fundraising; and 3% goes to Administration and human resources.

DW was established in 1911, DU in 1937.

Now that the official statements from each organization are out of the way, let's hear it.

This is your assumption not the facts. As you can see in the other posts administration costs are similar to both organizations. It cost money to make money. You can hire some yahoo for $15/hour to run a multimillion dollar organization and your going to get $15/hour worth of experience and success. Both organizations raise money for the same reason and I support both of them. The difference is going to come in personal preference. DU raises more money and provides funds on a much larger scale partnering with state and federal departments like Texas Parks and Wildlife building a 15,000 acre wetland at Richland Chambers or rebuilding the costal marsh in Texas and Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina destroyed it. Delta Waterfowl raises money on a smaller scale and a percentage of all the funds raised goes back to wetland conservation in the county the chapter is located.

DU has better 'gifts' and a cooler logo

We support both as well. Any organization that supports something we love is fine by me! We have donated hunts for auction in the past at their events to raise money. Give these guys a break!

truth

Whoa, whoa, don't be bringing those "facts" into this discussion.

I know just taking a quick look at their respective websites, I would consider DU a little more helpful for my purposes.

We can also look at something else here.

We are going to say for this example that "ducks and duck hunters" and "conservation and education" are the same thing.

Delta uses 83% of funds for this, and DU uses 82%.

Fundraising is also a 1% difference with Delta at 16% and DU at 15%

The big difference is the amount used for management/admin, Delta is at 1%, DU is at a 3%

Whether this is bad, or good will depend on the amount of money these companies raise for their budgets.

Keeping the numbers easy for a general example, lets say both have $100 to work with for the year,

Delta would seem more charitable as $83 of it goes to conservation DU only $82. And they spend $16 on raising more money DU only spends $15, while paying staff $1 DU pays $3.

But if Delta only had $100, and DU had $200, DU would seem more charitable as DU new payouts for the above would be $164 for conservation, $30 on fundraising, and $6 for admin. They also very easily justify spending a little extra on staff at this point, as they are obviously worth their pay in this scenario due to being able to raise double the amount of funds as Delta.

Really gotta look at their yearly totals to get the idea of who does more, and even then, if they're all for you, who can be against you?

As a personal rant, the above formulas in this thread also show why investors are complete morons today. They only look at one percentage, the profit% (or, as most are looking at in the above examples, conservation%). I'd rather have 4% profit on 10 million in sales, than 6% on 5 million, but investors would just glance, and take the 6%. Rant over.