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

[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.