Stop being so diligent

UshopUgive sounded like the perfect, painless way of donating. You'd click the link to any of its featured online shops - including all the big names - buy something, and a couple of per cent of your purchase price would go to your chosen charity. It was the biggest UK site doing this.

Today ushopugive announced it was closing. The retailers were apparently upset that buyers persistently used ushopugive's links, rather than going straight to their sites, and they kept having to shell out their lousy two per cent.

Big charities have problems renegotiating their cut from their branded credit cards too, because it seems that donors are irritatingly on top of their finances and too many of them pay off their monthly bill in full.

So is the solution that we donors stop being so smart, or is something fundamentally wrong with raising funds in these ways?

Email with karma

Time to dump the Hotmail account*. Ippimail's new free webmail will credit your karma while mailing your messages because... it gives 40% of its profits to charities.

It's also worthy because

• It can forward your mail or you can forward mail to it
• They swear blind not to sell your personal details
• You'll get at least two months without junk mail before the spammers find you
• It's Tuesday

Five-minute signup here

*But don't delete it, in case this bunch go bust

Not a good Budget...

...for these people:

Donors who put big sums into charities to get tax relief then pull the money out again, tax relief attached. (I believe we're talking rich people and their charitable foundations here). Stopping this is surely A Good Thing.

Charities who spend money on non-charitable causes. They'll lose the tax relief on that money. A horribly grey area that will keep lawyers/accountants happy. Probably A Bad Thing.

Charities who rely on generous legacies. The Inheritance Tax threshold has skyrocketed, meaning less money will be left to charities to keep estates below the threshold. Not Good.

Companies who stretch the spirit of the law when claiming charitable tax relief. Loopholes will be closed. Another Good Thing, although it probably means company giving will drop even further. Therefore Not Very Good.

Beneficiaries, who won't benefit from the overall reduction in income which the above implies. Oh dear.

Read a comprehensive summary (supportive of government) here

£1 million out of nowhere

On Saturday £1 million was donated to small charities by 200 normal people. How?

That's the total of four years of group giving by The Funding Network. Congratulations to founder and philosophising philanthropist Fred Mulder.

The Funding Network costs £60 to join and holds four events a year. Events work like this:

1. Members watch live presentations from small charities for six minutes
2. They quiz the presenters for another six
3. They each pledge £100 upwards in a theatrical bidding session

The members are generous because:

• Each charity is sponsored by a member who has a personal link to it and who has to pitch in the first £250
• The charities are vetted by a members' committee
• The charities are small and you are usually hearing from the people who set them up
• There's gentle peer pressure to give
• No big charities, foundations or government departments muddy the water

It's a social occasion, always educative, frequently emotional, often entertaining.

Anyone in striking distance of London, Glasgow, Cambridge or Bristol can join.

Why disabled people hate charities

Well, some of them anyway, as two articles on the BBC Ouch! site demonstrate:

Article 1 will amuse you: "To address issues in the Middle East, we send in the army, the marines, the navy and the air force, costing millions of pounds. To address disabled people's issues, we send in Paddington Bear, Sooty, the Wombles, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Tweety Pie."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/ouch/features/timeforchange/

Article 2 is more informative: "All disabled activists know that charity is a dirty word. As David Hevey once wrote, "charity advertising serves as the calling-card of an inaccessible society."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/ouch/features/charity.shtml

It's worth persevering on the site til you find the piece on one man's affinity with Davros and the Daleks (you find it).

Oooh controversy

The folk at donor advisory service Intelligent Giving haven't even started their website yet but they're already getting feathers flying with two new online surveys.

Donors are apparently venting their spleen at the donors' survey. [Postscript: Closed 5 July '06]

Meanwhile some charity professionals are more than ambivalent about the criteria at http://www.intelligentgiving.com/. [Postscript: Closed 2 July '06]

Join the fun!

Why small charities suffer

This is no news to charity workers, but most donors don't realise that...

1. Small charities don't have the profile to attract much money from donors like you and me. That's for the RNLIs of the world.
2. Therefore they have to rely on charitable foundations, government grants or contracts.
3. Those people usually have set ideas about what they want to pay for, and so the charities have to dance to their tune.
4. Sometimes the charities end up having to do something they weren't set up to do, don't want to do or can't do.
5. These grants never last longer than three years.
6. So after two years they spend a lot of effort searching for more cash.
7. They can try getting bigger to raise their profile (not necessarily in their beneficiaries' interests) or - see 2.

If you think none of this makes much sense you'd be right.

The solution, incidentally, is wealthy folk who take time to get to know and understand small charities, or people who contribute as a group.

For more detail, download Julia Unwin's revelatory The Funding Tango. Also see my latest entry on the same topic.

Jump on his head

Sometimes you forget about the complete lugheads who inhabit the Web.

And then you stumble across one of those sites that thinks it can get away with saying anything as long as it's not being completely serious. To some, this is irony; to the rest of us, it's moronic.

For an object lesson in studied ignorance - have your betablockers to hand – here is the piece that caught my attention: "Ten bulletproof reasons not to give to charity".

Death by trampling is my (literal) recommendation.

Hyper Generosity 2

Two days after my post about the self-seeking allocation of funds by most American philanthropists, The Economist comes out with an article that proves it. A couple of their observations:

• Despite a public which is twice as generous as the UK's and a government which gives much less per capita to social welfare, the US government remains the biggest contributor to health research. While in the UK, where the welfare system is better funded and we're all meaner, charitable trusts are the biggest contributor to health research.
  
• Stanford University's Social Innovation Review recently concluded, "We should stop kidding ourselves that charity and philanthropy do much to help the poor".

I'm emphatically not bashing Americans or America. I suppose I'm making the point that 'generous billionaires' ain't all they're cracked up to be.

The article also offers provocative commentary about what the serious philanthropists are thinking these days.

I do so wish the popular press would stop taking my lead. (Indulge me, folks.)