How inefficient is it to give to telephone or door-to-door fundraisers?

[fivemack]

Someone phoned me 'from {name inaudible} on behalf of Christian Aid' this evening, and informed me that there were many orphans in Zambia as a result of the HIV epidemic, that the cost of sending one of them to school was £86 a year, and that it might be nice to give Christian Aid seven pounds a month to this aim.

My naive assumption is that the right answer is 'yes, that would be nice, I'll send Christian Aid a cheque for n*£86, n depending on how rich I'm feeling, at Christmas', on the grounds that a telephone fundraiser might well take a cut of any donations to cover their running costs; does anyone know how much of my seven pounds a month would actually get to Christian Aid?

(I have a fiver-a-month standing order on behalf of a charity working for blind people, which I made as a result of a door-to-door fund-raiser, and I fear there's a rather larger cut being taken out of that; I should probably kill the standing order and make one directly to the charity)

Comments

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

Interesting site. As I expected working on existing donors is much more efficient than recruiting new ones, but its interesting that initial recruitment is actually done at a loss.

It costs a charity £5 to have someone contacted by phone, and they might pay a £90 fee to a recruitment firm for doorstep contact, so it sounds like churn is the worst thing for charities, so its better to stick with one scheme than hop around.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I suppose I'm basically wanting to do the equivalent of the practice which is killing off well-informed high-street shops, namely trying out a camera at Jessops then buying it from Amazon.

It is vaguely useful to me to be informed of the existence of good causes of which I was previously unaware, but it's not anything like as much useful to me as it is expensive to the charity, so, provided that the canvassing is paid out of raised money, letting myself be canvassed and then donating directly does good things for the good cause (yay) and doesn't encourage the middlemen (also yay).

It may be that there's a 'current causes needing money' aggregator with properties more like the high-end trade press - so there's a bias but you know which direction the bias is in, and for something like the Economist you can assume high competence from the writers and editors - than like letters sent me by Dell suggesting that I might be interested in a new Dell laptop.

I guess to some extent this is UNESCO's job.

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

There is also the element that direct marketing, whether by post, telephone or doorstepping is intrusive. If you respond to such approaches the organisation will use the technique more. If you can feed in the money in another route, say a website donation, then their management will adopt a different approach.

Monitoring which cause is most urgent is hard work, and I'd rather give money to one of the big charities and let them worry about it. In some ways seting up bequests in your will is the ultimate transfer of responsibility, but I'm still tempted to fund park benches in every county, if only it were easy for my executors to organise.

[(Anonymous)]

Website donations have indeed begun to outstrip direct mail for some charites and I think it is going to be a welcome revolution all round. The bigger charities have the advantage that they can track their fundraising methods and consistantly review and improve.

[1ngi.livejournal.com]

sorry - that was me.