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

Re: Don't do it!

[monkeyhands.livejournal.com]

It looks I'm out of date on the information laws. I was a fundraising/admin/tea-making volunteer for Oxfam in Wales about thirteen years ago and I remember then that Oxfam made a point of never selling details on but a lot of charities were notorious for making money out of selling lists. Then of course you had the FOI Act and the whole "If you do not wish to unsubscribe, please fail to neglect to untick this box" business.

I think "warm calling" is fine in principle, and I've done it myself, but I do have a big problem with outsourcing that kind of thing no matter how much money it saves the charity.

I'll do a post on my own blog about why I have a problem with chuggers rather than cluttering up fivemack's LJ.

P.S. Your post about digital poverty was really interesting. Thanks for sharing it.

Re: Don't do it!

[monkeyhands.livejournal.com]

Oops, forgot to close the inverted commas. I meant fivemack, of course.

Re: Don't do it!

[1ngi.livejournal.com]

"I'll do a post on my own blog about why I have a problem with chuggers rather than cluttering up"

Oo - shall read with interest. I'm a professional fundraiser and I don't actually agree with chuggers - I think it buggers up people's brands.

Your post about digital poverty was really interesting. Thanks for sharing it.

Thanks! If you ever come across anything that is happening in that field, i'd be very interested to know.

Re: Don't do it!

[monkeyhands.livejournal.com]

"I'll do a post on my own blog about why I have a problem with chuggers"

Have now done this here.