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

[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.