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

[drsulak.livejournal.com]

Here in the happy US, it is 15% or so. That is, the boiler-room operators get 85% of what you donate. Really.

Always better to donate directly to the organization. Personally, I take a dim view of any organization who would choose to raise funds like this.

[diffrentcolours]

Why do you take a dim view? Shouldn't a charity raise as much money as it can? If paying a cut to chuggers / phonebanks etc. still makes them more money, it's clearly in their interest to do it. It means more money going to good causes.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Same sort of reason that I don't like PFIs; if you're going to do it that way, you should do it with your own personnel out of your own overheads, which are transparent to you, which you can manage and allocate, and which you have more reason to keep small, rather than by paying the phonebank or the chuggers' arbitrarily-determined opaque overheads.

It may well be that an excellent way for a charity to raise money is to pick the most susceptible oligarch in Romania and bribe him with hookers and cocaine to give them money. I'd take a dim view of that, too.

[pavanne.livejournal.com]

You would? I figure if it's actually a good cause, the hookers and cocaine are a very mild evil if they stop people dying of AIDs, etc.

But then, I give to chuggers if I'm in a good mood and they're attractive. I could say I'll give when I get home, but I know it's a lie; I'm not really a good person, despite feeling bad about people dying of malaria for want of a 50p mosquito net at the time. I figure there are other people like me, and so chuggers probably are diverting money which would otherwise be spent on beer and Eurostar tickets to helping the needy.

I don't do religious ones, but only because I hate religion.

[drsulak.livejournal.com]

Game theory says yes. $15 for my charity is better than $100 for someone else's charity.

However, let's assume the amount of money people are willing to donate is relatively fixed. That means the amount of dollars available for good works is drastically reduced - I'm taking an aggregate view here.

The counter-argument goes something like this:
"We get people to donate that normally wouldn't, and we get them to donate more"

This is perhaps true, but not on the order of 600%. Cold calling, even with a targeted list rarely exceeds 1% response. That's why the skimming percentage is so high.

Finally, most people do *not* realize how much is getting skimmed off. By law in the US, they are required to disclose the skim percentage. But you have to ask, and even if you do, they find clever ways to avoid a direct response.