The positive news of 2020 is that in spite of fundraising challenges we were able to double our donations! Thank you so much to all of the donors who made this possible. Like many other organizations, we were negatively impacted by COVID. Unfortunately due to the travel restrictions Father Hieu was not able to come to the US and do fundraisers. In addition, we were not able to travel to Vietnam to do an in-person audit. In spite of the challenges, we were still able to increase our donations and issue more grants!

You may also notice that our efficiency has dropped as a result of an increase of overhead. This is almost exclusively due to the fact that we can now take credit card payments. When selecting which credit card processor to use, we had to make some assumptions as to which processor would be cheaper in the long run. We were deciding between two different companies: one that charged a very low per-transaction processing fee but had a higher fixed monthly fee, and one that charged a higher per-transaction fee and no fixed monthly fee. The fees end up being the same when our monthly donations are $700. We ended up selecting the processor with the higher monthly fee (more expensive at lower total donation amounts) because we feel that in the long-term this will end up being the cheaper option. The BOD will re-evaluate this decision every year and may change in the future. For now we want to keep the same processor until we are able to do in-person fundraisers.