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]

No idea about the fundraising overheads, but at least you should do these things through Gift Aid to get the extra tax money. You can also invoke Gift Aid for up to 6 years retrospectively on donations you have already given.

[huggyrei.livejournal.com]

I don't know - personally I don't give money when solicited over the phone because I feel that it's unfair to expect to give an answer immediately. My Mum is the rep for Christian Aid at my old church and I know she doesn't get paid, I could always ask her details of how to give a one-off donation or something?

[meirion.livejournal.com]

If you're seriously interested in giving money to AIDS orphans in Zambia, might I suggest teaming up with a few like-minded friends to donate to the Makeni Ecumenical Centre? They're actively looking for new sponsors of AIDS orphans right now (and reckon it's the best way to donate to help them) and we have personal contact with the Centre organiser, so are about as sure as we can be that the money's actually getting to help them rather than being wasted on administration costs/fat cats' trips/ whatever ...

[fjm.livejournal.com]

This might or might not be useful.

http://www.charityfacts.org/charity_facts/charity_costs/index.html

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

I don't know what the cut of the phone operators is (if any), but Christian Aid's income / outgoings page is here (http://www.christianaid.org.uk/aboutus/incomeandexpenditure/spend/index.aspx). It contains these two this pie charts for a year's spending:

[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]

The Charities Commission website should give you a reasonable breakdown of accounts.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Christian Aid are way too "Christian" and not enough about the aid. They will give help and not just bibles, but I`d rather the help didn`t come with the bible at all. Action Aid are a British charity who help without enforcing specific Western religions, and I`d suggest looking at them too.

[aldabra]

I don't think you should give to them because they phoned you up and badgered you. Phoning people up and badgering them doesn't necessarily have any positive correlation with being a good cause.

I second the suggestion of looking at Action Aid (we've just sponsored a Vietnamese girl through them).

Don't do it!

[monkeyhands.livejournal.com]

I know this is duplicating what other people have said, but: ignore for the moment whether or not it's a good cause and think about whether or not it's a good method of raising/giving money.

My answer to that is: definitely not. If someone is "calling on behalf of" a charity that means they're not working directly for the charity. It means the charity is outsourcing its dirty work to save costs. And the dirty work in question involves cold-calling your home, which in my view is completely unacceptable anyway.

I have a massive problem with the argument that "charities need to make/save as much money as possible because they want as much money as possible to go to good causes". It's just a thinly disguised version of the capitalist argument that all "efficiencies" are good. What happens is that a charity thinking along those lines will outsource a lot of its fundraising to the cheapest/most effective company. And of course the cheapest/most effective company will treat its staff like absolute s***. And it will be as aggressive in its fundraising as it can legally be.It will have to, in order to be "efficient" enough to get the contract from the charity.

As for your question about the cut being taken, the experience of the people I know who've done this is that the fundraiser you spoke to won't get any cut of the money you donate. They usually get a flat rate per hour. It's certainly possible that management get incentives for harrying staff into raising more money, but I think it's unlikely that the telemarketer himself will see any relationship between the amount they raise for the charity and the amount they get paid.

So, as far as I'm concerned, this isn't about efficiency. This is about ethics. Do you want to encourage charities to outsource their work to call centres that treat staff like crap? Do you want to encourage more charities to cold-call you at home? Could you handle it if Christian Aid subsequently sold your details on to ten more charities and they all started phoning you at home as well?

When I get a telemarketing call, my strategy is always just to say "Perhaps in other circumstances I would buy/donate, but I don't want to do anything to encourage cold-calling, so I'm afraid the answer is no this time."

[1ngi.livejournal.com]

There is no shame in working out your personal principals for charitable actions and sticking to them in spite of whoever calls you up.

I have a small 'portfolio' of causes if you like and I give regularly to some and lobby and campaign for others. I have no hestitation in responding to whoever asks with 'I have my chosen causes and I will continue to support them.'

If you wondering how to choose a cause and the best way of supporting it then it depends if you consider yourself 'cash rich/time poor' or the other way around. It's all relative.

I think one of the most fabulous things that the Cambridge IT circle could do would actually be to use their amazing skills and knowledge to reduce digital poverty Africa. The mobile phone is proving to be one of the most brilliant agents for change at the moment. At the moment schools struggle for desks and blackboards and teachers. Most charities just don't thinks of plowing in digital infrastructure/knowledge sharing at the same time - because they just don't have the expertise and the vision to make it fly.

There are pockets of this happening, but I can't help feeling that for many Cambridge people this could so easily be a wonderful opportunity to make an amazing difference.

I've waffled on about this before: http://1ngi.livejournal.com/34660.html

Edited to add link.