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]

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.