The Charity Blogger

Canadian couple give away lottery winnings

2010-11-05T16:03:00.001Z

Why is this such an extraordinary story? Why doesn't this happen every week?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11699678

We have moved

2008-01-08T03:29:00.000Z

Quite some time ago actually, but we just want to make it obvious to new visitors to this blog.

Please see our latest thinking about the UK charity world at Intelligent Giving.

Olympics costs spiral - as predicted

2007-02-05T19:02:00.000Z

Over a year and a half ago I pointed out that this would happen (with advice from a few seers - see the original blog entry) and things have actually got worse than expected.

There's talk of the Big Lottery Fund being raided because the initial estimate of £2.38bn has now catapulted to almost £10bn. Despite building plans being downsized.

And charities will suffer. Like I said. More at the Intelligentgiving blog.

Fat cat charity salaries

2007-01-26T07:58:00.000Z

A few comparisons at intelligentgiving.com to dispel the myth that charity bosses get enormous salaries: Chelsea FC and Save the Children have the same annual turnover but Jose Mourinho trousered £5.1 million in 2004 while Save the Children's boss got £95,300...
read more digg story

Gongs for charity

2006-12-30T08:38:00.000Z

The New Year's Honours List (Wikipedia definition) was published this morning. I started listing all the awards to do with charitable works then realised it would take me all morning - which in itself was a heartening discovery.

Here are the most obvious ones (the entire list, with many more, is here). Does anyone know which are definitely deserved... or not?

George Gordon EDINGTON - Chair, N.C.H. For services to Children.
Brigid, Lady CROFTON - Lately Trustee and Vice-Chair, UNICEF UK. For services to Children and Families Overseas.
The Reverend Canon Patricia Anne ATKINSON - For services to Street Children in South
India.
Mary Elizabeth, Mrs MARSH - Director and Chief Executive, National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. For services to Families and Children
Ms Nina Lizette BAROUGH - Founder and Chief Executive, Walk the Walk Worldwide (Breast Cancer Charity). For services to Healthcare.
Michael David William GOOLEY - Chair, Trailfinders Travel Agency. For services to the Travel Industry and to Charity.
Robert Lawrence BANNER - Chair, Rethink Charity. For services to Mental Health.
Jennifer Susan, Mrs BYERS - Lately Executive Director, Donor Services, Charities Aid Foundation. For services to Charity.
Garth Michael GUTHRIE - For services to Charity.
Dr David Gerald HESSAYON - For services to Gardening and to Charity.
Joseph LISTON - Chief Executive, Jersey Electricity Company. For services to the Electrical Industry and to Charity.
Alan David BLAIR - Chief Executive, Wessex Heartbeat Charity. For charitable services in Hampshire.
Irene Helen, Mrs CALLAGHAN - For services to Nursing and to Charity in Angus.
Paul John FLETCHER - For services to Sport and to Charity.
Ms June Kunadu SARPONG - For services to Broadcasting and to Charity.
Leslie VINCE - For services to the Marfan Trust Charity.
Patricia Eleanor, Mrs WALLS - Chair, Cats Protection Charity. For services to Animal Welfare.
William Hugh YATES - Lately Deputy Chair, Suzy Lamplugh Trust. For services to Charity.

Admin costs are dead

2006-12-29T12:45:00.000Z

From today's Intelligent Giving blog:

"ADMIN COSTS ARE DEAD. With the new accounting system recommended by the Charity Commission ("SORP 2005"), which nearly all charities are now observing, it is now impossible to work them out - and we will drop them from our site in the New Year.

The change represents an over-reaction (presumably an uncontested one) by the voluntary sector's lobbyists. Clearly the public wasn't consulted about the new SORP; but the public wants at least *some* clue of how much is spent on support costs. Now it is not being told anything meaningful. Too misleading. You wouldn't understand. Forget it.

It's a pyrrhic victory and a big shame: it won't increase the public's confidence in charities; it will just make people more suspicious."

If you subscribe to this blog you should also subscribe to the Intelligent Giving blog

Intelligent Giving is live...

2006-10-31T19:55:00.000Z

...and it's big and it's pretty clever.

http://www.intelligentgiving.com

Admin costs, again

2006-08-16T20:19:00.000Z

As I suspected: charities' administration costs generally bear no relation to reality. More at the Charity Sleuths

From earthquakes to 9/11

2006-08-15T10:10:00.000Z

My opinion on your money being siphoned off to Hamas or to 'terror cells' is simple:

Giving money to international aid is always risky.
Not all the money will get there, you can be certain of that.
Not all of it will go where you'd expect it to go - you can be almost as certain of that.
But when it gets to the right place and is used in the right way it makes a big difference.

I'd also make the point that the charities alleged to have helped terrorist organisations are not big players and you are highly unlikely to have given them money: Interpal is small by aid agency standards (£3m expenditure) and Crescent Relief is miniscule (£70,000). Your only involvement is that your taxes subsidised them fractionally.

A serious charity challenge

2006-08-06T20:18:00.000Z

I get occasional emails from folk doing mad things for charity, asking to be featured here.

But I'm afraid they are all gazumped by Jean Béliveau whom I met in Malawi two years ago. He is taking 12 years to walk around the world (yep) with the simple aim of promoting the UN proclamation of the "International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-violence for the Children of the World".

He's a tad eccentric, obviously, but also a rare, inspirational man.

He gave his wife two weeks' notice that he was going to do it. But she has stayed with him (in spirit, in their home in Quebec) and updates his website for him.

Having walked the length of Africa, Spain, France and Ireland since I met him, he's just arrived in the north of England, which marks his halfway point and I hope to meet him again when he arrives in London in a few weeks' time.

His view on the real Africa - where, as everywhere, he relied on the generosity of locals for his food and shelter - is the best informed and most thoughtful I have heard. He also knows a lot about boots.

See his progress here.

The Charity Blogger is resting

2006-07-31T18:13:00.000Z

For more frequent, voluminous and informed comment, please visit my chums at the Intelligent Giving blog.

Darfur adrenalin

2006-07-24T06:39:00.000Z

When I first heard of another online video game that teaches children (and the rest of us) about international aid, I expected the same worthy lesson in logistics as the UN's FoodForce.

However the first stage of "Darfur is Dying" reminded me of my first foray into Duke Nuke 'Em (ahem) , frantically tapping my arrow keys to guide my 12 year-old out of the reach of Janjaweed Landcruisers. This one will capture kids' (and your) imagination and educate them about what's really happening. Start here.

Over-the-top and over here

2006-07-18T21:44:00.000Z

American-style conspicuous giving finally arrived in the UK on 5 May this year. Apologies for taking so long to find out.

The country saw the first jetset-class charity auction to rake in serious money, in the same way that charity auctions around the US regularly bring in millions, with the compère haranguing tables of millionaires for not giving enough (though I can't find out if the latter actually happened at this event).

The event opened with the appearance of the Sultan’s Elephant, apparently. I think that's a living, breathing elephant though I can't be sure. It was closed by Sir Elton John; we aren't told how.

Prizes included a guitar lesson with Chris Martin followed by dinner with his actress wife Gwyneth Paltrow (pulling in £140,000), a yoga session with Sting and a Damien Hurst painting. Bill Clinton sent a personal letter of endorsement to everyone on a somewhat exclusive guest list.

It raised £18.4 million - all of which went to the brisk, businesslike and I suspect very productive Absolute Return for Kids.

More from The Times on this event and the new philanthropists.

Another tsunami

2006-07-17T16:12:00.000Z

I read about the tsunami a good half hour before the BBC got to it. The site to watch is GlobalVoices which aggregates blogs from around the world. For first-hand accounts it can rarely be beaten.

Here's hoping the Pangandaran beach tsunami is as small as the name suggests.

Pillow talk

2006-07-12T16:47:00.000Z

Ever wondered why journalists don't name names when things go wrong in disaster relief? I found out yesterday at an event for journalists and aid agencies sponsored by Alertnet.

Daily Mail veteran hack Ann Leslie summed it up (to a sea of nodding heads): "Smaller agencies can be quite corrupt. But they've got the Jeep, they've got the plane, they've got the access - and we need them!"

And so the hacks don't expose them. It's as simple as that. She tried to temper it with, "Of course there's a cosy relationship but we don't just repeat what we've been told!" But I think that made it worse.

Now you know.

Why bother?

2006-07-08T19:14:00.000Z

Help me. I'm trying to come up with facts to persuade the naysayers to give to charity. I'm thinking of people whose eyes roll heavenwards when they hear, 'charity', and who dismiss givers as naive or stupid.

I have come up with nine lines so far. As many as possible are predicated on the fact that self-interest is the best motivator (and that no-one likes to be preached at). Please offer up your reaction/suggestions.

1. It's good for us
All research on happiness comes to the same conclusion: the more we look outside of ourselves, the happier we get. I'd imagine giving to others is a good sign of looking outwards.

2. You'll be more popular (probably)
Research on schoolchildren shows that the ones who help charities are more popular, happier and more respected by their peers. Do you think the same might apply to adults?

3. We're lucky...
We are the lucky country: democracy, peace, sun & showers, plasma TVs, no malaria/ lions/ scorpions/ earthquakes/ hurricanes/ volcanoes, all protected by a moat. Britain is extraordinary and it's not through any effort of our own. We have lucked out.

4. ...but not all of us
Most of us don't see a fraction of the problems in this country (and who'd want to?). But many problems are there and occasionally they'll prick your bubble. Gruelling statistics are available but if you don't have the appetite, believe it: there's plenty to fix.

5. As for other countries...
If you go to a poor country you'll meet people with genius in their eyes but you'll know they will stay poor because they cannot possibly escape their situation. Then you'll realise it's not simply your brilliance that explains your nice lifestyle (see 3).

6. Others have paid for us
Great Uncle Cyril and his great uncles shelled out to create wonderful things we take for granted. Apart from hospices, helplines and scanners, this includes life-changing laws (equal rights, free education and healthcare) which charities lobbied for. What wonderful things shall we leave behind?

7. It works
If charities weren't around, government and business would forget about social needs, the arts would collapse, and young, old, poor, bullied and disabled people would have a very grim time indeed. Charities provide a third of all social services in the UK. The money clearly makes a difference.

8. We're freeloading
If you have cycled anywhere, been to the theatre, enjoyed a view, been to hospital... a charity has almost certainly paid to improve your experience. Fair dues?

9. You'll be joining everyone else
The most conservative statistics say 65% of Brits give to charity but most put it nearer to 85%. So if you don't give you're in a pretty tight, I mean small, minority.

Naive, stupid, moi?

Medicine for the soul

2006-07-06T10:21:00.000Z

This blogger's entry is too good to rewrite (though I've shortened it). Take it away, Albert:

Enrique’s Journey recounts the odyssey of a young boy who travels from Honduras, clinging to the tops and sides of freight trains, to reconnect with his mother in the United States.

The tops of the boxcars are controlled by gangsters. Bandits rob and sometimes kill the children.

Yet it’s common for the people who live along the tracks to throw small bundles to the migrants as they pass:

'Families throw sweaters, tortillas, bread, and plastic bottles filled with lemonade. A baker, his hands coated with flour, throws his extra loaves. A seamstress throws bags filled with sandwiches. A teenager throws bananas. A carpenter throws bean burritos. A store owner throws animal crackers, day-old pastries, and half-liter bottles of water. People who have watched migrants fall off the train from exhaustion bring plastic jugs filled with Coca-Cola or coffee.

'… A stooped woman, María Luisa Mora Martín, more than 100 years old, who was reduced to eating the bark of her plantain tree during the Mexican Revolution, forces her knotted hands to fill bags with tortillas, beans, and salsa so her daughter, Soledad Vásquez, 70, can run down a rocky slope and heave them onto a train.'"

More inspiration in humanity at White Courtesy Telephone aka the American Charity Blogger.

Teaching kids to give

2006-07-04T10:33:00.000Z

Lumbered as we are with The Citizenship Curriculum which was voted last year as "the worst taught curriculum", methinks this country's schools need inspiration.

I'd like to suggest some. Here's a simple and smart idea from Canada:

Teenagers in a school are divided into groups
Each group researches the most pressing needs in their community
They then search out the charities catering to those needs
Each group then argues its case for the primacy of the need and the charity
The winning group's charity is given $5000

Educative, absorbing, inspirational. It's called the "Youth and Philanthropy Initiative", created and financed by the Toskan Foundation and I hope we see something like it here soon. Any takers?

Fewer choices - better results?

2006-06-29T13:29:00.000Z

Someone has at last had the sense to apply psychology - specifically a controversial social psychologist - to help people choose a charity. The result is at Guidestar's shiny new Giving Formula.

Instead of offering a list of all (20?) types of charity, there's a simple four-way split between "Personal", "Emotional", "Social" and "Environmental".

The truth is that those aren't the right four words to describe what they represent (a spot of user research could fix that), but what I like is the fact that they are meta-categories, namely: health & medical; arts & music; poverty & rights; environment & animals.

Guidestar is challenging the common assumption that most donors know precisely which cause they want to support. Trying to distil their choices into four high-level groups is a canny step forward. The Formula is not perfect, but I like what it's trying to do.

Big Money

2006-06-28T08:04:00.000Z

A good thing about rich people is that they tend to be competitive. Which is why they're rich and why, in America, they're generous. Let me digress for a moment: in America, people don't think about whether or not to give. They just give. Everyone does. And they compete over it.

So unless the Ukraine/Switzerland match paralysed some key cognitive parts of your brain (understandable) you'll have seen that a famously rich yet frugal man has given 85% of his fortune away, most of it to the genuinely progressive Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

An indication of the clout of his £20 billion: it would keep the UN going for the next 10 years.

Also today it was announced that a wealthy 39-year-old Brit is responsible for the most generous grant-giving organisation in the UK. Apparently he set up his hedge fund to give half of its annual assets to children's charities in order to motivate himself.

Will such announcements start a trend? Simon Jenkins thinks so, and is well worth reading.

New boss rocks up

2006-06-22T08:00:00.000Z

I know for most people the Charity Commission is some funny government department that, um, has something to do with charities.

This lack of knowledge is understandable because anything to do with government is, by definition, boring. But as it happens, the Commission is less boring than most government bodies because, a, it's allegedly independent from government but dependent on it for funding and, b, it allegedly has the role of policing charities but also of helping them. Strange animal.

The important news this week is that it has a new Chair.

The last Charity Commission Chair was very dynamic and was starting to shake the place up. The new one, I am told by someone who knows her, is equally energetic, open to new ideas and apparently bloody smart. What's more, she sounds like a rock star: Suzi Leather.

If she lives up to her name, the Commission may develop a stronger role and may - who knows - make charities more effective. Watch this space.

Click here for Ms Leather's biography

Bargain of the year

2006-06-19T12:53:00.000Z

A friend boasted to me that on Wednesday he made a 250% profit on a £100 investment.

At a Funding Network event (see earlier post) he pledged £100 to an organisation which reprieves traumatised asylum-seekers from their medieval detention centres (details at BID).

Within minutes of the pledge, a mystery gentleman announced he'd match all the donations pledged so far. Clearly not a Daily Mail reader. So my friend's gift was doubled, as was the attendant Gift Aid (£28 x 2)*.

Can anyone beat that? Does this kind of thing happen anywhere else?

*The Funding Network takes a modest cut - around 4% - for administration.

The best list yet?

2006-06-15T09:59:00.000Z

There's a new list you can use to search for UK charities and it's a high-fat alternative to the other big contender, GuideStar. Highlights include:

The biggest list: coverage of 220,000 organisations across the entire UK - including non-profits which are not registered charities.
Search by a meaningful set of categories (eg Elderly, Social Welfare). This is a big advance over the other offerings. However categories haven't been assigned to all entries and you'll miss out if you want a comprehensive list.
A postcode search which lets you define your local radius (from 5-25 miles).
Search by whether or not the organisation has a website. Nice.

It's from the charity banking organisation CAF. Researching donors will also be happy to know that there are rumblings of a new secret weapon from GuideStar and I wonder when that will roll out and what it will deliver...

CAF's advanced search is here.

The other World Cup rankings

2006-06-11T20:08:00.000Z

STOP PRESS 28 June: Just discovered a far better version of this at Who Should I Cheer For!

The heroic performances of developing countries in the World Cup deserve closer attention; this chart highlights the supporters' handicaps, prioritised by life expectancy. Red boxes denote the worst/smallest.

Click the chart for the full-size version.

(Knocked together during England's dire second half against Paraguay, if you were wondering.)

Only 1000 charities

2006-06-09T09:15:00.000Z

Apparently there are only 1000 charities in England and Wales that donors should bother themselves with. That's according to the Intelligent Giving blog. The conclusion is based on their researchers' hunt for charities that actually solicit money from the public (proportionately very few) and spend at least £250,000 per year.

This dovetails with the observation by the Charity Commission Chair last week that at least 15,000 charities probably don't do anything.

So there you are.

London's charity palaces

2006-06-07T15:00:00.000Z

The Salvation Army HQ puts most corporate offices to shame. Its glass shell sparkles onto St Pauls Cathedral in one direction, the Thames and Tate Modern in the other. It sits in one of the most expensive parts of the most expensive city in the world.

London is full of charity HQs like it.

Smart businesses that want to save money seek out more modest rents. Microsoft, for example, goes for cheap business parks in bland towns around the world (apologies to Reading). Microsoft is rarely found in a capital city.

Oxfam recently adopted the same logic, relocating from its buildings in Oxford to a nearby business park. It reckoned it will save £500,000 a year as a result. More to spend on beneficiaries, presumably.

How many millions (from our donations) would other charities release if they did the same?

Bloody brilliant

2006-06-01T17:53:00.000Z

Blood. How pure a donation is that? No overheads, no fundraising costs, no duplication and - vampires on the wards notwithstanding - a guarantee that 100% will go to a good cause.

If you're really smart you can double it up with your regular do-gooding, like this resourceful doctor did while operating on a child with his own blood type in El Salvador.

Feeling all tingly? No excuses then: where to give blood.

Made in China

2006-06-01T05:49:00.000Z

China can boast what is probably a global first this century:

It has turned from an international aid beneficiary into a donor.

"International funds, once an important source of support for the poor, are drying up," according to Ge Daoshun, a researcher with the China Academy of Social Sciences. And flying into the breach are China's millionaires, who are now shelling out three times more to charity than they did last year and "are giving more regularly, creating more sustainable charity projects and looking to use the money more efficiently."

The government meanwhile is financing road-building across Africa (seen with this correspondent's own eyes) but for reasons that aren't so clearly philanthropic, especially since tens of millions of Chinese people still live on less than a dollar a day.

More from the China Daily

Disaster porn

2006-05-31T09:27:00.000Z

Some sensational stories scooped off the latest issue of a free magazine:

The real reason for 2004's 'swarm of locusts drought' in Niger was high food prices caused by suppliers defaulting on deliveries.
Cheap air travel made disaster relief harder, not easier, after the Tsunami.
Well-organised radio stations are more effective then conventional aid in most natural disasters.
Smoke from cooking fires is the fourth greatest cause of death/disease in the Third World.

The magazine is the UK government's surprisingly candid and interesting Developments (quarterly, free subscription).

Earthquake wizardry

2006-05-28T07:13:00.000Z

The silver lining in Yogyakarta is that the area is already well served by charities helping out at the nearby Mt Merapi volcano (satellite map showing how close they are) and those doing tsunami reconstruction on neighbouring Sumatra.

The UN's ReliefWeb is the site to watch in these situations. It already carries yesterday's Situation Report which lists the national and international responses. Examples of what the commercial news reports are missing:

The Indonesian Department of Social Affairs already has tents and field kitchens in place.
Medical staff from UK charity Merlin appear to have moved fastest, having already flown to the area on commercial flights.
There's already been a meeting of 23 international organisations (at the Aceh centre) to co-ordinate the response.
The Red Cross, Red Crescent, Islamic Relief and Merlin are flying in two tonnes of medical supplies this afternoon.
A large multi-agency mission with the usual suspects (World Health Organisation, UN, World Food Programme, CARE) are driving to the city today.

Click here for a list of the charities already there

Charities: the new religion?

2006-05-25T17:30:00.000Z

Amnesty International was created at a time when religion and socialism were dying - and it took the place of both, according to a new book.

Amnesty founder Peter Benenson said the purpose of Amnesty was to "rekindle a fire in the minds of men (sic). It is to give him, who feels cut off from God a sense of belonging to something greater than himself, of being a small part of the entire human race."

Methinks this concept will strike a chord for many charity (not just Amnesty) enthusiasts.

The book is called "Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International". It's a tough, cerebral read, but the fact that the author spent a year inside Amnesty makes it compelling, whether or not you grasp all that thinking. Will he or won't he join Amnesty at the end of his combobulations? Read a (non-revelatory) overview here.

High-minded Bristol

2006-05-23T06:54:00.000Z

Residents of Abingdon searched most on the Tsunami

Bletchley is the town that wants to know a lot about "charity"
Wakefield is most interested in the "Charity Commission" (are they sure?)
Glasgow is the city that most wants to "volunteer"
Portsmouth really wants to "give time"
Bristol most wants to "donate"
Thames Ditton wants to "give money" but then it also most wants to "make a million" (are the two facts connected?)

Which brings us to Farnborough which most wants to "get rich" and Croydon which desperately wants to "make money".

The stats from new search plaything Google Trends are probably meaningless but they're great fodder for time-pressed bloggers.

Big Brother's accounts

2006-05-21T06:12:00.000Z

10p of every vote cast during Big Brother (note for non-tabloid readers: a new series has started) will be divided between three charities: Shelter, Teenage Cancer Trust and a third to be chosen by the fruitcake who wins.

In the last series 15 million votes were cast. If Channel 4's ratings keep their form that's a £1.5m charity jackpot: a shot in the arm for Cancer Teenage Trust's yearly income of £4.4m and welcome pocket money for Shelter (£42m).

These are household name charities and popular causes. There are 160,000 other charities to choose from, some far harder to fund than others. I'm just curious: can anyone tell me how Channel 4 chose those two?

Forgive my gratuitous search engine scamming while I list all the Big Brother contestants to see if they bring in more visitors: Grace, Richard, Bonnie, Pete, George, Shahbaz, Mikey, Lea, Imogen, Dawn, Glyn, Lisa, Sezer, Nicki. In da house! Davina McCall, Dermot O'Leary, Russell Brand, you rock! (That's more than enough - Ed)

Cyclists vs Motorists

2006-05-18T17:40:00.000Z

Don't worry, this is not that old debate (the problem is bad drivers, two-wheeled or four). But let me tell you how I nearly died a couple of weeks ago, and what I learned from the incident.

One moment while I mount the pulpit.

One morning, a motorist in a hurry came within inches of pancaking me onto my pushbike. System 1 kicked in but thankfully I couldn't catch up with him to swear even louder.

After I reached the safety of the cycle towpath and the calming sight of waterfowl and bulrushes, I pedalled my way to a more sensible response:

I concluded that the fundamental problem here in London is that cyclists and motorists are constantly funnelled into the same tiny spaces. Blame medieval road planners. The solution is cycle lanes, real ones that physically keep bikes and cars apart. I don't know how to build or lobby for them. So when I got in that day I looked for people who do.

"Cycle lane" and "cycle path" produced duff results at Guidestar's charity listings but Google came up with the goods: Sustrans - the people responsible for the National Cycle Network - and the London Cycling Campaign (LCC).

The LCC website offered their plans for the future, up to 2008, and I liked what I saw, while I couldn't easily find what Sustrans was planning* (a mystifyingly familiar scenario on charity sites) - but I did see that they had clout and results. And neither seemed to be sitting on too much money or blowing too much on admin, fundraising or salaries (I'll write an entry eventually on how to spot this).

The result: 60% of my cycling safety fund will be going to LCC, 40% to Sustrans. Satisfaction. Karma.

*Their website is now bursting with plans about the Olympics so they are forgiven

Beating lifeboats into missiles

2006-05-15T09:18:00.000Z

The RNLI is one of "the most persistent charity holders of arms investments" according to the Campaign Against Arms Trade. I suppose if you're sitting on £378m you've a duty to spread your investments (including to Rolls Royce whose Hawk jet fighters sell so well in the developing world).

The Leukemia Research Fund is the other persistent one. It has a £1.3m stake in Smiths Group (trigger systems for Israeli attack helicopters).

Cancer Research UK has just withdrawn its 30,000 shares in BAe Systems (cluster bombs). Bless its cotton socks.

Funny old world. More from CAAT.

Friday Monday rant

2006-05-11T16:16:00.000Z

An email I just received from Monday says, again: "And five times more out of every pound goes to charity than the National Lottery."

That's as good as a lie. And I think any jury would agree. Hope so.

The fact is that 28.5p per pound goes to 70 large charities in the first year (Monday's stated 30p really is a lie - how fun) rather than the National Lottery's 28p per pound going to thousands of mostly small non-profits.

And can people stop plumping up the feathers of Monday's MD Craig Freeman by calling him a social entrepreneur? Anyone who says, "There was no lottery here until 1994 so there was all this pent-up demand" is not a social entrepreneur. Social entrepreneurs work to help society, not to secure shares for the board worth £3.4m, share options worth a further £5.2m, or a £1m company bonus scheme and employee incentive plan.

Best overview is in The Guardian. More in the Indy. Even more at the Fundraising Technology blog.

Trustees: the basics

2006-05-09T17:33:00.000Z

(aka "Why it's very hard for a trustee to be a fraud")

Nothing clever-clever here. Just an overview of trustees for those who don't quite understand what they are about. So to begin:

Charity trustees are the equivalent of company directors, but with one main difference: they get paid nowt except for the expenses of attending meetings.

So there's nothing in it for them except doing good, networking and being seen to do good.

As with directors, they are collectively called a board.
Also like directors, they meet a few times a year to help make strategic decisions about the charity.
Chief Executives are the ones who actually run charities and they normally are *not* trustees and therefore *are* normally paid. They keep the board up to date with what is going on and try to persuade it that what they are doing is right.
Significantly, trustees usually have to leave after two or three years to bring in fresh blood and they, or charity members, vote for their replacements.
An effective board will usually contain no more than 12 trustees, most of whom care deeply about the charity and have a range of experience.
Larger boards can have problems reaching consensus but, equally, any size of board will be ineffective if it has limited passion or competance.
A patron, incidentally, is not a legal term. A patron is someone who has agreed to be called a patron.

That covers it. Charities generally have a hard time finding trustees so if you fancy offering your services, visit TrusteeBank. If you're a trustee please give us your opinions via the Comment link below.

Beating the charity ratings

2006-05-03T08:40:00.000Z

NEW YORK (Reuters) - An executive at a heart disease charitable foundation who embezzled close to a quarter of a million dollars over two years to pay a dominatrix to beat him was sentenced on Tuesday to two to six years in prison. More..

Ho ho.

Curiously enough it was this kind of scenario that sparked off the creation of the US' top charity ranking web site. A wealthy individual learned that his donations to a charity were being using to put the CEO's kids through college (more honourable, I grant you, than paying to be spanked). He promptly pulled the charitable giving and created an organisation that ranked charities by their finances: Charity Navigator.

I like Charity Navigator because it comforts you that donations are being used as promised. However I don't like the stress on the finances at the expense of details around planning and outcomes. Someone summed up the problem: "Judging a charity by its finances is like judging a wine by the number of grapes you put in it."

The academically-minded might enjoy this PDF comparison of Charity Navigator and similar sites.

National Lottery vs Monday

2006-05-01T10:38:00.000Z

The UK now has two charity-associated lotteries: the National Lottery and funky new upstart, Monday.

First things first: as a punter, you are far more likely to win a prize with Monday. More info

As far as the charitable side goes, here's how they compare:

	National Lottery	Monday
Amount to recipients:	28p per £1	30p per £1*
Potential recipients:	Over 100,000 non-profit bodies	70 well-known charities
Punter chooses recipients:	No	Yes
Recipients prioritised by:	Social need, as defined by a board made up of voluntary sector workers, seasoned with government pressure	Their agreement to pay 5% of their income to help market Monday in its first year
Charity Blogger's take:	A necessary evil supporting countless smaller non-profits	Yet more money siphoned off to the big boys

*Monday says it sends five times more to charities, as percentage of takings, than the National Lottery. True but utterly misleading: it's based on the fact that the National Lottery helps many non-profit organisations that aren't registered charities. You wonder what other egregious facts they have up their sleeve.

Useful links
How the National Lottery money is spent - by area/date
How the PlayMonday money will be spent
"It belongs to the England of Hogarth and Gillray, of Gin Lane..."

Debt cancellation that worked

2006-04-27T17:20:00.000Z

I feel compelled to quickly make up for the earlier glum news from Sri Lanka.

I recently caught sight of an Oxfam press release which has a concrete example of debt cancellation working - one to throw at cynics of Make Poverty History.

As a direct result of debt cancellation and aid increases agreed at G8 last year, Zambia has made health care free to everyone living in rural areas, scrapping all fees. On the back of their G8 windfall of $4 billion, the government is also investing heavily in education.

It means thousands of people will get medical treatment for the first time in their lives.

Have a nice Bank Holiday.

Sorry stories from Sri Lanka

2006-04-26T18:00:00.000Z

Two friends recently returned from Sri Lanka, travelling independently of each other. Neither work in disaster relief but both are smart and aware and made a point of asking people about their experiences. They told me similar things, among which:

16 months later, many people are still living in tents.
In a rush to hit spending budgets within the first 12 months, several Western charities reverted to the culturally insensitive ways which they all claim to have left behind. So when fishermen from one village were presented with a fleet of modern fishing boats they pointedly ignored it and built their own traditional boats from local materials. The new ones glint in the sun on the beach. No-one asked them if they wanted them.
Ironically an alarming proportion of the disaster relief money still hasn't been spent (hence the tents).
Western hotel chains are greasing official palms so they can stick their hotels where the fishing villages were, pushing the locals inland (away from their fishing boats).
Homegrown local charities appear to be doing the most useful work.
Sri Lanka is on the verge of a three-way civil war.

The inside track from Sri Lanka here.

Sorry.

70 charities that count

2006-04-24T16:43:00.000Z

What a wonderful idea: a list of British charities which an emphatically independent evaluation organisation has decided, after painstaking research and soul-searching, that everyone should know and support.

The list is here and growing by the week. Register on the site and you'll be able to read the two-page report on each of the 70+ entries. I suspect it's the first list of its type in the world.

Hats off, again, to New Philanthropy Capital.

Why small charities suffer #2

2006-04-20T18:00:00.000Z

Added to the bizarre fundraising treadmill that makes life hard for small charities, more issues:

Many government contracts for local services, allegedly the saviour of small charities, are being snapped up by private companies. The relevant article is here somewhere.

Because they don't have the time, contacts or name, small charities can't easily find affordable office space (particularly in London).
Larger charities used to give grants to smaller specialist charities. But now the trend is for them to do the work themselves - arguably to the detriment of the beneficiaries, not to mention the charities that know every ridge and mark of the coal face.

Because they don't have the time, contacts or name, they also can't easily find trustees with influence or experience.

So, thoughtful donors might ask themselves, what can I do to help the outfits that still have the passion, the grassroots connections and the low costs that larger charities might have lost?

A good first stop is the Community Foundation Network which connects donors with small charities in their area. Happy hunting.

PS Still no word back yet from Cancer Research UK about the alleged employee's comment attached to the Admin costs entry

Why we give to disasters

2006-04-18T06:35:00.000Z

It doesn't make sense. We are happy to give £6000 to each person affected by the London bombings, but reluctant to cough up £4 for a sleeping net for someone living in a malarial country (see previous post: The Value of an African) - when it's likely that the £4 will make more of a difference.

But at last pyschologists have worked out why. It's apparently all down to System 1 and System 2. System 1 is our kneejerk reaction, derived from hunter-gatherer days when we jumped to attention at the first hint of danger. System 2 is slow, analytical and involves, say, working out that your money will go a long way if you give to an anti-malarial campaign.

You might argue that Heart vs Head isn't a dissimilar concept. But there's more to it. It's also about numbers. Our hunter-gatherer brain is inclined to calculate in tens, not hundreds, and it blanks out completely when presented with (threats to) millions (of people). This PDF by Paul Slovic gives the detail.

The answer, charities are advised, is to tell the story of one individual who represents what 999,999 other people are going through. We primitive donors can identify with that. And I suppose if the charities aren't doing their job, we should search out those individual stories, override our caveman brains with System 2, and give.

There's more like this at the surprisingly readable Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Tabloid scandal!

2006-04-13T16:10:00.000Z

I read The Sun once a fortnight, partly because I think it’s important to know what three million British people think, but also because a copy is always lying around at my local greasy spoon, and I like my omelette and chips.

I've discovered that it’s not as predictable as the people who never read it think. Today for example it carried no fewer than three charity-related stories:

The CEO of Cancer Research UK in a full-page spread railing at the government about delayed provisions for early detection of bowel cancer.
The CEO of Refuge taking up half the lead editorial page discussing a new law allowing apparently contrite wife-batterers less harsh sentencing.
Not in the same league but nonetheless: an independent survey revealing that 15% of Sun readers are aware of all the ways to contract HIV/AIDS as opposed to 10% of Daily Mail readers *sigh*, and then listing those ways.

So Sun readers may know more than you think. In fact when it comes to the charity world, they may know more than you know.

The donor's philosopher

2006-04-12T17:02:00.000Z

I recently finished The More You Give: a thought-provoking book about how and why to give to others. It's an agreeable concoction of philosophy and anecdote aimed at the general public.

Author Mike Dickson is a wise man with a lifetime’s stash of stories and experiences, and a pleasing turn of phrase.

Mike presents the book as a self-help guide, and the first half of it is indeed a lightly philosophical tract, based heavily on his own experiences of nurturing his Whizz-Kidz charity, with a few reader exercises thrown in.

His religious and faintly dogmatic tone might raise the odd hackle – but I suggest you trust his direction and let him carry you through to the second half of the book which offers original thinking and information about the charity world.

The book is sprinkled with challenging opinions. For example: “Whether it’s two per cent or 10 per cent [that you give away], you will almost certainly not miss it… It will not be noticed and life will go on.”

So true. He's self-published so if you want to buy, sidestep Amazon; buy direct.

Smart women don't work in charity?

2006-04-05T07:39:00.000Z

The quality of charitable work may have declined since the 1950s when men allowed women to move into their areas of work.

Alison Wolf explains: "The period from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century was a golden age for the "caring" sector in one major respect. It had the pick of the country's most brilliant, energetic and ambitious women, who worked in it as paid employees, but who also gave enormous amounts of time for free. Now, increasingly, they do neither."

"So," my fiancée asked, "Are you saying it's just laggard females left working in charities, while the smart ones boss men around in the City?"

You could interpret that from Ms Wolf's Prospect magazine article, which may stir your thinking on the future of society generally.

Bono "is wrong"

2006-04-03T16:57:00.000Z

That is, he's the wrong person with the wrong messages to front international development causes. Why? Because he's..

White
Irish
Rich
Powerful
Isn't saying anything new (poor Africans blah blah blah)

A rising marketing guru reckons Bono fails several historical prerequisites of successful changemakers, namely that he isn't..

From the area
Affected by the problem
Making sacrifices to aid the cause (eg Rosa Parks)
Telling a powerful new story (eg Martin Luther King)

Discuss.

I heard this (highly simplified) theory last week from Douglas Holt at a conference for influential, brainy people, and a blogger, who say they want to help the world.

Stop being so diligent

2006-03-30T18:16:00.000Z

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

2006-03-28T16:49:00.000Z

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...

2006-03-23T10:33:00.000Z

...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

2006-03-19T06:10:00.000Z

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:

Members watch live presentations from small charities for six minutes
They quiz the presenters for another six
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

2006-03-16T18:23:00.000Z

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

2006-03-09T17:47:00.000Z

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

2006-03-07T18:54:00.000Z

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

2006-03-01T18:26:00.000Z

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

2006-03-01T17:58:00.000Z

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.)

Don't help the needy

2006-02-27T14:58:00.000Z

Targetting people who need the most help is a good idea, right? Not always, according to a new book out this weekend.

The New East End is a solid research piece on the largest Bangladeshi community in the UK, London’s Tower Hamlets. Among other things, it says that 75 per cent of white couples in the borough are hostile to Bangladeshis (average hostility being a sobering 34 per cent).

"Newcomers have been prioritised over patient and well-behaved working-class white families"

Why the hate? Because the stories about Bangladeshis coming off the plane at Heathrow and being sent to the top of the housing ladder… were true. Liberal middle-class guilt and bean-counter logic meant that newcomers have been prioritised over patient and well-behaved working-class white families. So now the latter hate the former, funnily enough.

What’s the solution? The book doesn’t offer one. But pundit Will Hutton pulls no punches: “Means testing and targeting are, in the long term, a social, racial and values disaster,” he says.

So what does that mean for donors who want to target the most needy? Methinks we have to define what 'need' means first. Answers on an email please….

Oxfam in trouble

2006-02-22T14:04:00.000Z

Not really. All I want to know is how the Charity Commission enters data into its Register.

It offers an interesting variation on Oxfam's income for last year. Guidestar's got it right at £253,300,000. But some addled soul at the Charity Commission typed in £2,375 (corrected 25 Feb - original screenshot below). The fact that the Charity Commission provides Guidestar with its numbers makes the cockup all the more mysterious.

There's more where that came from but I think the point is made.

Online accounts entry system anyone?

Hyper Generosity?

2006-02-22T02:30:00.000Z

Slate Magazine turns up again with more provocative information.

It's the week of the Slate 60 list, which ranks Americans who gave most 'charitable donations' last year. Most charitable is in quotes for a reason.

Sadly the most generous person has died and it's her bequest of $400 million which knocks Bill and Melinda Gates ($320m) into second place. Encouragingly, both she and the Gates are known for donating to causes which help people in real need.

"Giving is more about enlarging the size of their headstone than about helping people."

The disturbing observation is that when you scroll down the list, it becomes clear that American universities are the most popular kind of beneficiary.

It's these people's right to put their money where they like, but are their gifts honestly 'charitable'? Having your alma mater build a library in your name falls into a different category to the Gates' distribution of health tools across the developing world.

I suspect for many of the people on this list, giving is more about enlarging the size of their headstone than about helping people.

Charities or people first?

2006-02-16T16:35:00.000Z

A recent article in Slate Magazine about how to give to charity is very muddled.

It tries to explain why you shouldn't spread your donations too thinly. But the author mixes cod psychology and a fixation on finances with arcane equations.

He's under the common misapprehension that by giving the largest sum of money to one or two charities, a donor has the greatest effect. Of course the truth is that we should look past the charity's financial health. You're not supporting the charity, you're supporting what it is trying to do. The two are not the same.

"The scattergun approach surely gives a boost to a handful of beneficaries"

So what if ActionAid raked in £83 million last year and you only gave it £5 a month because you also spread your beer money to Greenpeace, Amnesty and your community centre? If you think you won't make a difference to Action Aid, a vast multinational organisation, you're right. But to a family in Sudan, you might save their lives.

If you follow our friend's logic, then most of us normal folk should only give to one small charity, where our modest donations will be felt most. If that were the case, you'd confine your £20 a month to your community centre and, yes, you'd cover the water rates for a year and the trustees would be jolly happy. Shame about the family in Sudan.

I have my doubts about £4 or less being cost-effective for charities to collect every month but beyond that, the scattergun approach is still satisfying to many of us and surely gives a boost to a handful of beneficaries.

Eton Mess

2006-02-10T07:27:00.000Z

If you're a rural public school, the Charity Bill which will hit the statute books this year - inshallah - could prove your ruin.

I hear that the wonks are vacillating over the extent to which public schools have to provide "a public benefit".

Specifically, they are discussing adding the word, "substantial". If they end up with this, then the usual suspects like Eton and Harrow may yet get under the wire because they have multiple scholarship schemes and operate in large urban areas so they can open up their facilities to the oiks in the holidays.

"Schools that can't play the oiks-helped numbers game may be forced to lose charitable status."

But if you're out in the sticks, like (insert name of one of a hundred rural public schools), there's precious little community to serve. And because you can't play the oiks-helped numbers game, you may be forced to lose the staggering financial benefits of charitable status.

But who cares? Which other type of charity makes a point of serving the richest people in the country? It'll just be interesting to watch.

Pretty generous pictures

2006-02-07T07:12:00.000Z

Getty Images will give 10 dollars to the American anti-poverty group ONE if you write a caption on one of the prettiest sites on the Internet.

What to dislike?

Make Poverty History..history

2006-02-04T21:23:00.000Z

This week Make Poverty History, wristbands and all, evaporated.

Most of the founder bodies voted to dissolve it, insisting that the time to make their point - the UK's podium position in the EU and G8 in 2005 - had passed.

It's a shame because the results of their work will need sustained pressure if they are to see the light of day. For example the G8 'principle' of 100% multilateral debt cancellation, and the government's 'promise' to make UK aid more predictable.

Here's hoping that the global anti-poverty folk GCAP will have the clout to sustain the momentum, though the fact that their UK web page is several months out of date doesn't inspire confidence.

Time to kill charity

2006-02-02T07:18:00.000Z

Although as a hands-on guide to giving How to give to charity falls short, it's the best book on the subject so far: interesting, digestible and a pleasant way to pass an evening. I particularly liked the historical scene-setting.

I hope I'm wrong, but I don't think the book will fly off the shelves. In the same way that its two predecessors The Major Charities and The Good Giving Guide didn't sell.

I'm hoping that the other new contender, The More You Give, (review to follow) will have more success but I have my doubts.

The market is there. I think the problem is in the branding. Youth charity Youthnet realised this and spent time researching its users. They discovered that the word, youth, was alienating to teenagers - so they dubbed their flagship website thesite.

If the 'How to give' books avoid the words 'charity' and even any variation on 'giving', they will discard several centuries' worth of baggage - and might engage with the public. Any alternatives anyone?

Not many people know that

2006-01-26T20:30:00.000Z

Small Muslim charities have the immense disadvantage of not being able to apply for funds from the Big Lottery Fund (the saviour of many small charities). Islam won't allow it because of the way the money was raised. And you can see their point of view.
We're going to see a lot of red over the coming weeks, because that's the colour Bono and chums are going to be using for their enormous new charity campaign which starts any day now. Bigger than Make Poverty History. Remember, you read it here first.
It will soon cost donors to read any worthwhile cross-comparison of charities because the Charity Commission is going to charge organisations to access its data - and those costs will have to be passed on. But then the Charity Commission has never bothered itself about donors. (That's enough, Ed)

Apologies to Michael Caine

Tsunami - the results

2006-01-20T11:06:00.000Z

Donors who want an inside track on the first year of Tsunami relief now have access to several reports. We rate them:

"A UN witness in Meulaboh saw “20 surgeons competing for a single patient”."
The International Red Cross came out not so long ago with a short report concluding that the initial response to the tsunami was chaotic. 7/10 - mostly for digestability.

"Our conventional approach of doing assessments first before determining our assistance... [led to] delays in our response in the first few days."
Oxfam's Accountability Report gives little mention of other charities, but it does mention how they'd do things differently next time. 6/10 - if you want to know what one charity did.

"In India, 70% of the participating agencies indicated that they collaborated... with another agency, and in Sri Lanka this number was... 85%."
The Fritz Institute is an apparently independent research tank which interviewed thousands of villagers and aid workers, and its Tsunami reports have clout. Shame they don't name names. 8/10 - for something like real insight.

If their past evaluations are anything to go by, The Disasters Emergency Committee's report, when it finally comes out, will be the most critical and balanced of the lot. Keep your eye on the DEC reports page.

Admin costs

2006-01-12T17:52:00.000Z

Some people think many charities spend 90 per cent of their income on administration. I hear this all the time when I discuss charities with others.

Then again some charities say they only spend 0.5 per cent on administration.

I'm not sure who's worse. The first are stupid. The second have cooked the books, or are equally stupid.

The truth is that since no two charities report their costs the same way, you'll never know who spends what on administration. If the figure's over 40% they need a new accountant.

But all this is eclipsed by unrealistic donor expectations: how on earth is an organisation supposed to run without administration? Would a factory line roll? A bank run? A restaurant serve food? Who would do payroll, fix the computers, repair the guttering?

Do you ask what the admin costs are when you buy a new car? Isn't the car the important thing, not how it was planned and manufactured?

If you're concerned about inefficiency, consider this not uncommon scenario: a charity which performs miracles - then goes under because no-one set aside the time or resources ("administration") to get more funding.

Two tidings of joy

2006-01-08T10:44:00.000Z

Happy New Year to you and, the signs are looking positive for donors*.

A few days into 2006, two books surface from good people with original points of view, aimed directly at you and me. They don't look dull and worthy, and they are well written.

First off the block is Mike Dickson's The More You Give, soon to be serialised in the papers. It's not quite sure if it's a self-help book or a practical guide to giving but the first couple of chapters are eminently readable - largely because the man has tons of experience and a pleasing turn of phrase. Review to follow.

Second off, from Jessica Williams who wrote the intriguing 50 Facts That Should Change the World comes How to Give To Charity. It promises among other things to "unravel what modern charity is all about". More intrigue. When the book finally arrives I'll review it too.

* Are you one of those charity folk who sneak in here from time to time? I see you in my logs! Naughty!

Video game goodies

2005-12-27T12:09:00.000Z

In video gamedom, saving the world normally involves blasting baddies to bits - but there was a new option this Christmas. My friends Sally and Sam played the first of a new genre of do-gooder alternatives. It comes from the UN, it's called FoodForce, and the idea is to teach kids about disaster relief. Here's what they thought:

Sam (13): "It was very interesting but i wouldnt play it every day. it taught me a lot about the United Nations and their help to third world countries. i dont think it would appeal to my mates but the makers could improve it by reducing the time the people talk on the game, and increase the gameplay time."
Score: 6/10

Sally (10): "i now know that we only need a half of the food we have and we could give africa a bit more i also realise how much time and effort that it takes into getting the food there. I would try my mates but i don't think they would like it. It would be good for school but a bit wierd and boring at home."
Score: 8/10

Download FoodForce (it's free)
An overview of "Serious Games"

Christmas signoff

2005-12-15T10:16:00.000Z

Off on an extended holiday now, lucky me. So...

Merry Christmas to all you lovely donors, beneficiaries and charity workers - and best of luck for 2006!

I look forward to learning more, with your help I hope, in the New Year.

Two failures

2005-12-15T08:00:00.000Z

News just in: The 2005 Year of the Volunteer failed to increase volunteering.

Oh. And how much did that little lot cost? Should heads roll, as they would in business? Why do I doubt that will happen?

The 2000-2003 Giving Campaign didn't work either ("Charitable giving in the UK in real terms has been about flat over the last 12 or 13 years." Stephen Ainger boss of Charities Aid Foundation, 2005)

A theme is emerging methinks. What's the problem here?

Was it because there were idiots in charge of the campaigns? Unlikely.
Was it because we Brits don't like being told what to do? Likely.
Was it because charity people are not the ones to run such campaigns? Perhaps we need people more like us to inspire us. Even likelier.
Or maybe one year isn't long enough. As one of the smarter people* in the charity world has said, "..the biggest failure of the Giving Campaign was that it was only to last for three years. I cannot find anybody who can offer a coherent explanation for this. It is beyond me that people could conceive that giving could be transformed in three years."

*Joe Saxton, head of research company nfpsynergy

Let them eat money

2005-12-08T12:19:00.000Z

If disaster relief were a fashion then the new Black would be:
giving money - rather than bags of grain - to starving people.

Following trials in, among other places, Banda Aceh, Oxfam is now handing out cash to drought-threatened Zambians. No, they don't blow it all on iPods. It seems to be working.

Donated cash	Donated grain
Empowers, raises self-esteem	"Yes bwana, thank you bwana"
Benefits local/nearby farmers	"What's the point of farming?"
Improves the local economy generally	"No-one here has money. I'm taking my business to Gabarone."

The same holds true about donated clothes. Local clothesmakers, associated businesses and traditional fashions die out. But none of the charities seem to be doing anything about that.

Anyway the big report on all this is at the Overseas Development Institute

Strepsil-induced ramblings

2005-12-03T11:20:00.000Z

The cold bug has struck. So, even less structure than usual. In fact, here's an utterly random list of items:

The pastor of a church (with charitable status) was recently told by the Charity Commission to give back to his church the £200,000 which he spent on accommodation, a blowout birthday party, a flash car and a time-share in Florida. That's it. Give back. Maybe I'll set up my own prosperity gospel church if that's the worst I have coming to me..

Not only are the big charities getting bigger but the small charities are getting squeezed out because... the former used to give grants to the latter but are now bringing all their work inhouse. So beneficiaries are missing out on the passion, sensitivity and innovation of the small outfits. Sources here are hazy. Please comment, people - I know you have an opinion!

Guidestar UK will cost £1.4m a year to update. Anyone know who's going to pay for it? And how will they fix the fundamental OCR inability to produce usable text from the annual reports? The Charity Commission's simple scans are far more readable... ... oh never mind...

A big problem for society is that donors think charity people are mostly dreary do-gooders and charity people think donors are mostly capitalists with small consciences. The truth is of course so much more complex and... I'll expand on this one day.

*Cough*

What to say to a chugger

2005-11-24T18:30:00.000Z

Chug·ger, n: One who browbeats shoppers into signing a direct debit form they don't want to sign for a charity they cannot judge.

We all know that chuggers are the latest breed of double glazing salesmen, only worse because they accost you on the street. It's basically a hard sell - and who likes a hard sell?

So next time you're greeted with the happy-clappy glower and 'Have you got a minute?' variant, here's some ammunition:

"OK, if you can tell me the Home Office's declaration on fundraisers' remuneration." This will almost certainly fox them. It reiterates the law that they should tell you - without you asking - precisely how much they earn. Details on the Charity Collections website
"No, I don't approve of your method of fundraising. It gives charities a bad name." Self-evident.*
"How do you know I won't put false details on your form?" Plenty of people who aren't very good at saying no do this, I learned first-hand from an ex-chugger.
Or if you feel a bit of a nonce saying any of the above, try:"Look! Your pants are on fire!" Followed by swift exit.

More pause for thought here

*When Which? magazine asked 1,000 people this month "what they thought of face-to-face fundraising, 81 per cent said it was a bad idea".

Forward with the People's Picks!

2005-11-23T07:03:00.000Z

Search the web for recommendations of charities based on solid research - dispensing with the awards which are mostly based on bums on seats at award ceremonies - and you'll get one good result.

The site is called New Philanthropy Capital. No it's not a Chinese restaurant - it's a research outfit which focuses on social needs, writes 50-page reports on them, and recommends charities which are doing a good job.

Three cheers then for the good People of the NPC!

The Constant Gardener

2005-11-21T07:30:00.000Z

If you can see past the luvvie cast, overextended scenes, irrelevant nudity and the (otherwise haunting) script and story, you will see in The Constant Gardener the most visceral take on East Africa and Aid that has ever hit celluloid. Go and see it.

And then consider a donation to the associated Constant Gardener Trust. Since top charity transparency expert David Bonbright is on the board of trustees, I wouldn't worry about the money not getting there or the work being unproductive.

A preview of Guidestar UK

2005-11-18T16:54:00.000Z

And so, in a fanfare of silence, the most comprehensive listing of UK charities slid off the slipway today.

I presume that this is a testing phase and the public launch will come later. With that in mind, and after an hour of experimenting, here's my first take on how that £3+ million was spent:

Researchers will love it. The simple navigation which applies equally across all types of charity makes it very easy to find comparable data . For example, go to Organisation > People and you'll see that Oxfam's head honcho earns under £90,000. UNICEF's under £80,000 and no-one at Medecins sans Frontieres* gets more than £50,000.
Largely because there's no guidance as to which are the most important criteria, and how to compare them, the average donor won't see a lot more value in it than the Charity Commission's Register. I can guarantee they won't bother wading through all the marketing that the charities have added to their entries. Looks prettier I suppose.
The search is hilarious. It's some clever clogs 'clustering' technology which ranks the Centre for Alternative Technology up there with the RSPCA when you do a search on 'cats'. Hmm. You'll have fun uncovering your own howlers. A touch of manual categorisation, even at a macro level, would have controlled the search - but how to tame the surreal clustered phrases it generates? Try it for yourself. User testing? Hello?
Hardly any of the Advanced Search options worked. I assume the techies were on a damage limitation exercise all day.
The Government's largely to blame since they're the ones supplying the core information (via their Charity Commission) but... this money has been spent on the wrong thing. Because charity data is still collected on paper and not electronically, vast sums were spent on teams of people typing details into this system. Instead, the £3m would do better subsidising an electronic capturing system for all charity data. Then updating it each year - not to mention capturing the data - would be stupendously cheaper.

Funny old world.

* a notably smaller organisation than UNICEF or Oxfam...

Landmark guide to go live

2005-11-16T10:12:00.000Z

The most comprehensive listing yet of all charities in England and Wales goes live this Friday. It's called Guidestar UK.

The launch is a turning point for three reasons:

1. It shows that the charity world is paying attention to the fact that donors want more and better information.

2. We are promised that donors will be able to search for charities by theme. Anyone who has tried to search for a particular kind of charity at the Charity Commission's website will know what an advance this is.

3. The improved transparency that Guidestar brings will open the doors for better debate.

Guidestar isn't perfect, and everyone's interested to know who will fund it next year, but it remains a landmark.

You read it here first!

The Charity Blogger Awards 2005

2005-11-11T05:52:00.000Z

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for attending our star-studded occasion in this beautiful space donated by blogger.com.

I know you're all dying to know this year's winners, so we'll promptly hand over the envelopes to tonight's host.... Ozzy Osborne!

"Well, d', er, hullo folks [rubs eyes], hope you're all cool. Yeah, so here are the results:

"It says here that the Longest Awaited Website Award goes to something called Guidestar UK [due to go live in April - are we nearly there yet?]
"What was that about, man?

"Next we have the Most Outspoken Geezer in the Voluntary Sector, that's Stephen Lee [typical comments]
"Rock on, Steve. Animal!

"The Longest-running Feud Between Organisations...well, they had a lot of competition, man, but this Award goes to to the Chief Execs' setup, ACEVO, and the cats who represent all the charities [fist in the air] NCVO... hang on, shouldn't thoiy be the same poiple?
[Silence]
"What do I know?
"Noice fuckin' work, guys.

"We got anything positive here? I thought all charity people were all cuddly, loike.

"Oh ' ang on now, this looks good: the Best Web Resource for Donors about Humanitarian Relief. This goes to those clever bastards at...Wikipedia. [Example: Kashmir earthquake entry]
"Noice.

"The Best Blog by a Donor is, hey, you can't do this can you? The Charity Blogger? That's you in't it? Cheeky bastards.

"Is that it?
"It goes on a blog so it must be short?
"Lazy bastards.. Noice.. where's the green room?"

All development charities are the same

2005-11-04T16:25:00.000Z

Oof, I thought that might catch your attention. But, hey, I read it here in the New Internationalist archives. The point they make about the generalist charities is that most of them support existing projects which were set up - and are managed - by local people. And that if you give to Oxfam, you might well be sponsoring the same, or very similar, local projects which are sponsored by... UNICEF or Save the Children Fund or Action Aid. So there you are.

The article also makes the point that in countries where the state is a finagling beast, church charities are sometimes the only channels you can rely on to make sure money gets to the right people. Food for thought, eh?

You'll notice that the article was written ten years ago. Nonetheless there is something special about it which warrants reflection: it's the only overview of international development charities - in fact of any charity sector - anywhere on the internet. Someone please prove me wrong.

How do the cancer research charities, the childrens' charities, the environmental charities work? We have no guidance. No wonder donors are confused.

"I've got it on a list"

2005-10-31T07:51:00.000Z

With apologies to Gilbert & Sullivan

You'd think it would be simple to find the details of all British charities working in Kashmir. You know, not just the big boys, but the small outfits - so you might have more of a choice of who to support.

But no. The Lord High Executioner might have been speaking for the mandarins of the UK voluntary sector when he said, "The task of filling up the blanks I'd rather leave to you."

The problem is, there are too many, competing, lists of charities (a familiar concept in this sector, Pooh-Bah) and, the ones that are easiest to search are incomplete... and the one that is complete has a search that will truly make you despair, young man (sorry).

Those best incomplete ones are: Charities Direct and Charity Choice

The one that is complete is, surprise: The Charity Commission

But today I'm not here to gripe. I have good news: any day now* Guidestar UK will go live with a complete list which will be searchable with a clever "theme-clustering" search engine. Just try it. Hurray!

Also the Charities Aid Foundation is building a comprehensive database of, not just charities, but voluntary and community groups, and this is due to bloom in the spring. Tra la!

And finally, for the example I gave, I lied. The British international charities have the benefit of the best search facility of any charity organisation: the British Overseas NGOs for Development. Search by location, work type or beneficiary type.

All ends with laughing song and merry dance.

*they have been saying this since April

The Last Taboo

2005-10-21T15:46:00.000Z

It's not Death. It's clearly not Sex. Giving Your Money Away now must qualify as the most avoided subject in British society. When did you last talk to anyone about it? Ever?

So, a good conversational gambit, if not exactly an ice-breaker, is: "How much money do you give to charity?" It'll get a dialogue going, I assure you, and the responses from even your closest kith and kin will surprise.

Trying it this week on a handful of associates revealed a bizarre variety of responses, for example:

"I give away the wages from the first week of each year, and all through that week I feel really good."
"I give [a lot] to Oxfam 'cause you told me they were good."
"I think one per cent is right, then I don't feel guilty."
"I give £2500 away each year and I'm amazed that the charities think that's a lot, and they treat me like royalty. It makes me think how mean most people must be."
"I give enough to a peace organisation so that the Gift Aid that the government adds cancels out the amount I give in tax to the Military."
"When you give me that Direct Debit form I'll fill it in but I can't be bothered to get it myself."

Do let me know when you see a Sunday paper columnist pick up on this.

Your charity insider

2005-10-16T08:37:00.000Z

There's a magazine all about the voluntary sector which you won't find in WH Smiths. I'll tell you right now you can't afford it, but it's called Third Sector and it's a revelation to the average donor. Some highlights from the latest issue:

Fair trade 'will not stop poverty' - or so says a new charity, Worldwrite, which has just produced a film to explain why.
It's "uncomfortable" in the cancer sector according to the boss of Macmillan Cancer Relief because there are over 840 cancer charities. It's the same with HIV/AIDS charities (there are at least 300). At least the Charity Commission is about to ask new charity applicants if they are prepared to collaborate and/or merge with similar ones. [Horse, gate, bolted?]
Average salaries for female chief executives of the largest charities are higher than men's.
The Disasters Emergency Committee is the most impressive charitable organisation in the country, according to a broad range of judges.
The second-best web campaign, according to the same judges, was UniAid's online game to help students manage their money.
The post of Lincoln Cathedral's 'Donor Relations Fundraiser', which demands broad experience, comes with a salary of... £18,000.

More news as I get it!

Martian earthquake relief

2005-10-12T09:51:00.000Z

If a Martian descended to earth and decided he wanted to give cash to help the Pakistan/India earthquake victims, he would soon decide the most logical (British) recipient is the Disasters Emergency Committee.

Why? Because:

The DEC represents 13 of the best respected relief organisations including Oxfam and Islamic Relief. No-one has the same mix of experience of disaster relief nor of working in the area.
The DEC gets a staggering amount of free airtime and advertising space on TV and in the national newspapers, so none of your cash goes into that.
The member agencies agree between themselves who is best suited to which areas and kinds of work, and apportion the cash accordingly.
In the unlikely event that there's any money left over, it is reserved for the next big appeal.

It's a no-brainer.

Don't fall for the big adverts by anyone other than the DEC (especially its member agencies like British Red Cross or Save the Children who are just trying to boost their own reserves at the expense of the collaborative effort - shame on them).

If our visitor's antennae were especially twitchy, he might want to use the excellent search facility at BOND where he could search for British relief organisations by the following criteria:

where they work
what they do
how they do it

Nanu nanu.

Too many disasters

2005-10-10T11:00:00.000Z

As featured on:

If you're reading this you're probably the thoughtful type, so you must be feeling somewhat drained about the Kashmir earthquake.

30,000+ people dead, 100,000+ lives ruined. Again. Like the tsunami, like Darfur, like Iraq, like Katrina.

It doesn't stop does it? And of course we can help by digging into our pockets... but each time, you get nearer to the point of throwing your hands in the air and declaring that there are too many people in the world anyway.

There is a solution - if not to the constant battering of humanity - but to the thoughtful donor's exhaustion.

What the aid agencies really want and need, is not one-off collections when another Act of God (bless him) hits. What they need from you is a constant flow of cash and a commitment over many years. This provides three great scenarios:

They can budget for the future and concentrate more on work than on fundraising.
They can comfortably create long-term strategies that they know will be paid for.
When the next disaster happens you can feel good about building up your favoured charity so they will be able to perform better.

That's that sorted then.

Down the plughole?

2005-10-10T05:54:00.000Z

Frankly I'm surprised it took so long for the stories about Tsunami aid being wasted to come out. It's a shame that journalists didn't dare do their own research before waiting for the Red Cross to point out the problems in its own report.

Every disaster relief operation has a degree of confusion and waste - it's unavoidable and the fundamental reason is: there is no single body to organise all the relief agencies.

You'd need some kind of world government to do this. And so our favourite charities compete for resources, publicity, staff on the ground and even for people to save.

The more arrogant agencies like - it has been known - UNICEF, actively plough their own furrow, not collaborating with other agencies nor consulting the experts: the local agencies and the beneficiaries themselves. Ironically some agencies do as much damage by poaching these experts, diminishing the local agencies' abilities.

I believe the Red Cross when it reports: "The enormous international response succeeded, in its own chaotic way, in getting aid to most survivors and preventing further hunger or disease." But donors could be more choosy in establishing the collaborative working style of the aid agencies they support.

For more on this, and the Pakistan earthquake, visit the SEA-EAT blog.

Public schools for all

2005-09-26T14:04:00.000Z

All British 'public schools' (elsewhere known as private schools) are registered charities and therefore they get the same substantial tax breaks as all other charities. Their beneficiaries are, in the main, the children of the most privileged people in society. It's a curious situation.

There is an argument for the tax-payer supporting these schools, namely that the children are not using the state's education resources, as they have been removed from that system. Whether or not they qualify in spirit as charities is another thing.

I only bring the issue up because the Charities and Trustee Investment (Scotland) Act was passed this summer, and now Scottish public schools are quivering in their furlined boots, waiting to find out if they still qualify as charities. And since similar criteria will be applied to English and Welsh schools, probably next year, they too will be watching in dread anticipation.

How many bursaries for poor students make a school a charity? Or is it down to how many days it opens its swimming pool to the public? Should the government not think of a different tax-relief criteria? Find out how the Scottish schools are responding on the Sunday Times site.

Corruption - an excuse not to give?

2005-09-16T14:27:00.000Z

A recent poll said that 80% of us believe that 'most financial aid to poor countries is wasted because their governments are corrupt’.

There's a distinction to be made here. The poll is probably roughly true about aid sent to large organisations like governments, because many are indeed corrupt.

However, aid channelled through charities that have have a longstanding, permanent presence in a poor country will be far more likely to get the money to the right place. This is a simple fact which I have observed, for example, with Oxfam in Bangladesh: aid goes from the national office to local charities which work at village level and which are visited and monitored every few months.

Two interesting sites to learn the likelihood of your hard-earned donations getting to the right place:
1. Transparency International's International Global Corruption Barometer - tells you how much people trust charities (called 'NGO's here) in a wide range of recipient countries.
2. The website of the charity you give to. See what they say about having a physical presence and a history in their recipient countries.

Simple.

Counting America's blessings

2005-09-11T08:00:00.000Z

Hurricane Katrina has accounted for several thousand deaths and a million homeless. Thankfully there are several silver linings, although some negative factors make up a more rounded picture. America is a charity paradox. It has:

- the world's most generous public (increasing every year)
- the least generous Western government
- the most publicised disasters (Katrina is the 20th most intense hurricane on record, with a tenth of the deaths from storms that hit Bangladesh every 15 years)
- the most to lose materially when disaster strikes
- the most charity scams
- the only country with services to help donors choose better charities

What to do with £8 million?

2005-08-31T07:40:00.000Z

The London Bombings Relief Charitable Fund has now raised £8 million. Gosh that's a lot of money for 1000 or so beneficiaries. Especially since they will also get free NHS support, a mandatory loss-of-earnings cheque from the government, plus the benefit of a new £1m post-Traumatic Stress Disorder unit.

The same amount hasn't been raised yet by the Disasters Emergency Committee for the people who are threatened with starvation in North Africa. There are 8000 times more of them (8 million).

It's illuminating to divide the amounts raised by the number of beneficiaries. See an earlier post on the same subject.

Bring on the fat cats

2005-08-26T10:45:00.000Z

I don't understand why it's OK to reward people who successfully run large companies, but not OK to reward people who successfully run large charities. Should do-gooders get less money? Why? Someone tell me.

City-style salaries are unknown in the charity world. A recent survey of 450 large charities illustrates the trend:

“The median salary of chief executives was £52,053. That’s under half the salary of local authority chiefs. 75% of charities have difficulties filling high-profile vacancies. Poor pay is cited as the biggest issue behind staff turnover.” NCVO Salary Survey 2004

If you want good people to run a charity well - to actually, god help us, target the right beneficiaries in the right ways - you need to attract and retain them with half-decent money. No?

Charities' dire salaries and job insecurity are key reasons why the charity world is half as effective as it could be. With abysmal pay, no pension, no benefits, no idea if your job will be there another year... well, how effectively would you operate?

I'd rather donate to a set-up where everyone is adequately paid, there's enough administration so the work doesn't lurch from funding crisis to project failure, and there's a great person at the helm who isn't looking wistfully at the broadsheet job pages every week. But that's just me.

Making up facts

2005-08-22T07:06:00.000Z

Because the charity world can't and won't tell us what it's doing, it has spawned a rumour mill which bounces between myth and absurdity. Two examples posted on USENET yesterday:

>>The RSPB spend most of each pound they get on admin, which includes
>>fat cat salaries, perks and windfalls.

This statement is probably untrue but it would take considerable research to disprove: the latest "Consolidated Statement of Finacial Activities" on the RSPB website does not break down expenditure by admin or salaries. It just shows that 0.5% of all expenditure went on "governance" - a suspiciously ambiguous title. And 75% of expenditure was split between various types of work (eg habitat conservation). You'd need to ring the press office to find the facts - and unless the setup there is very unusual, they won't be keen to help you.

>I read somewhere a charity only needs to give as little as 5p in the
>pound to be classes a charity.

I think I know what he's getting at. The writer will probably be even more shocked at the truth: there is no stipulation of how much a charity should spend on its beneficiaries. It can spend none if it wants, as long as its employees don't get paid fat salaries.

But here the issue becomes complicated. A small, struggling charity may spend a large proportion of its income setting itself up in the early years, hopefully to become very efficient in serving its beneficiaries later on (you have to hope). Or a big one may blow a year's income on publicity, to reap the benefits years later (ditto).

But most of us don't have sufficient information or understanding to make any judgement. And that's why these little stories will go on and on.

Smiles, hats and bombs

2005-08-08T15:00:00.000Z

Dominic Nelder is travelling on the London Underground every day this month in a suit and bowler hat with the single aim of smiling at, and saying hello to, as many people as he can.

He's doing it because he wants to restore people's faith in each other after the July bombings.

He's a solo phenomenon which will probably make more difference than the bombing-related initiatives cobbled together by the Establishment, emphatically including Ken Livingstone and his grating posters ("Seven million Londoners. One London" So what?).

One man, on his own, with his own great and very charitable idea, and the guts to carry it through. Chapeaux!

Read the Enfield Independent's article

The value of an African

2005-08-02T07:20:00.000Z

£1.25 - projected donation per recipent: Drought in Niger
Directly affected: 150,000 children dying
Also affected: 8 million people, health threatened to point of starvation
Funding target: £10 million ($19m)
Funds earmarked for: food, water, healthcare
History of the charitable fund: 40-year-old DEC - highly regarded
Donate here

£6000 - current donation per recipient: London bombings
Directly affected: 56 dead. 60 badly injured
Also affected: 1000 others, mostly mentally/financially
Funds raised: £6 million ($11m)
Funds earmarked for: to be decided
History of the charitable fund: none
Donate here

The Mean British Public

2005-07-25T11:10:00.000Z

Don't believe the hype. The Great British Public is mean. American citizens give twice as much to charity as we do. The Dutch, Danish and Norwegians give more. The Australian (public's) response to the tsunami was more generous than ours. And worse: we're getting meaner: we now give 25 per cent less to charity (as percentage of our Gross Domestic Product) than in 1993. The boss of the Charities Aid Foundation has the stats.

80% of adults may have given to Tsunami relief - which is astounding - and gave £400 million, says The Times. But bearing in mind that the British public gives £7 billion a year to charity, that's less than 20% of what we give anyway - and if Live Aid was anything to go by, it means that we will tighten our belts for the rest of the year and the overall pot will stay the same size.

This is no secret in the charity world. Small charities have braced their belts for lower income this year, and the figures in 2006 will probably justify their fears - if they are still in operation.

That's it. A rant. I think people should know.

Make Poverty... Easier

2005-07-20T16:00:00.000Z

Unless you've been living on Comet Tempel 1 (and if so, apologies for the crater), you'll be aware of G8 and Make Poverty History and wristbands and Geldof and celebrities you've never heard of.

If you got lost in the mix, let me try to explain it from this donor's perspective, and show how you can sidestep the very complicated arguments and arrive at one commonly accepted truth.

There are three main parts to Make Poverty History*:

1. Reducing or cancelling debt to many impoverished countries
There is argument around this ranging from: why do some countries get debt relief and others (who worked hard to pay back) get little reward? - to - won't paying off the debt leave some countries vulnerable to impossibly higher interest rates on subsequent loans (Laos is apparently against rescheduling for this reason) - to - won't the saved money only benefit the president and cousins, and not the country? All interesting points.
Controversy rating: 6/10

2. Massively increasing the amount of government aid to poor countries
The arguments against this are: well, all that money goes missing doesn't it? (It doesn't all, but sizeable chunks are sometimes unaccounted for. According to anecdote, aid given by charities, not governments, has a better record of reaching its destination); all the money goes on air-conditioned LandCruisers, bloated administration and salaries (a modicum of truth, but you need good people and infrastructure to get anything done on a big scale).
Controversy rating: 7/10

3. Bringing wealth to Africa by stopping Western protectionism and investing in African business
Any takers? No? There is no argument here**. The people who rail at the first two points agree that this is a good strategy. And the people who bang on about the first two points also bang on about this one.
Controversy rating: 1/10

So there we have it. If you hear anyone saying Make Poverty History is a load of old cod, ask them about their view on supporting trade with Africa. (And if you're in a contrary frame of mind, you can raise the other two points.)

But what you may see now is that the organisations which support trade with Africa are probably on the soundest footing. Big hitters here include Oxfam's Make Trade Fair Campaign and the Fair Trade Foundation. But there are other groups you've never heard of which are probably doing a grand job in the background. The Trade Justice Movement is the big one and their site is worth a scan if you have the stamina for more detail (and good on you if you do).

* There is a fourth, which is stopping AIDS, but this is arguably part of each of the other three; you need money to do it.
** Except for the environmental one, which opposes Western-syle economic growth in developing countries.

Big Mouth Strikes Again (thank god)

2005-07-17T06:17:00.000Z

John Bird is the ex-alcoholic, ex-con and ex-most-other-things who founded The Big Issue magazine sold by your local friendly homeless person. To say he speaks his mind is like saying morphine is an analgesic. He's the only person I can think of in the do-gooder arena who could be described as dangerous.

John's latest fireworks showered over the Guardian Unlimited web pages last month when he said that some homeless charities make the homeless problem worse. I've never read the like in the press before. The voluntary sector tends to keep such doubts to itself. John was raising an issue that is regularly debated in closed circles and he unveiled the common thinking that, "A lot of homeless organisations never give people the opportunity of growing up and looking after themselves."

John is an extreme, messianic-style character (his words), but that doesn't detract from his deep experience nor from the no-bullshit deduction he employs when talking charities. Frankly it's a shame he doesn't get more airtime, dragging debaters behind him.

John has a new web site which recommends organisations - mostly charities - which he believes addresses society's problems in useful ways. I don't know of other site which recommends charities with such authority or attitude. It's called Best Practices for Change (http://www.bp4c.com).

Are there too many charities?

2005-07-15T16:10:00.002Z

A few issues really make the charity world squirm, and one of the most titillating ones is: are there too many charities - or not enough?

We have around 200,000 charities in the UK ('around' because no-one's sure how many there are in Northern Ireland, but that's another, unbelievable, story). This is a lot, even if you exclude the types you wouldn't normally put money in a tin for - for example, grant-giving foundations, friendly societies or *cough* private schools.

Now this all seems a bit surprising if you go through the motions of registering a charity, in England at least (which I happen to be doing). There is a 43-page application form to fill, significant sections of which are large empty boxes into which you have to explain your aims, activities and fundraising strategies. It's the kind of form You Need To Know How To Fill Out. You must also append your organisation's Constitution - the kind of document which keeps lawyers and their extended families in beer money for life.

"Children, animals and London do well. Crazy people, single mothers and Clwyd don't."

If you get your application right, you'll be a charity in six months. Anything less may set you back a year or longer - or forever. Charity Commissioners have allegedly reduced applicants to tears because they didn't use the right parlance in their repeated applications.

I can only think the Commission wasn't always this demanding. Either that, or most of the charities formed since the 1601 Statute of Charitable Uses are still going.

I digress. The Commission is a beleaguered organisation - they have only 600-odd staff for all those charities for goodness' sake - and funnily enough they seem agreed that there are too many charities. They were very happy with the creation of a Collaborative Working Unit by one of the big umbrella bodies last October, designed to get charities to work together. Quite right: good idea.

But it's clear that some charity sectors and geographical areas get a bunch more money than others. Children, animals and London do well. Crazy people, single mothers and Clwyd don't.

As charity bigwigs insist when it suits them, you can't generalise about charities - and that observation must hold true in this case. I'm told there are over 50 prostate cancer charities, which is probably an inefficient way of tackling the cause. Yet I know that there's no local charity helping the frazzled old boy who sleeps in my local park.

"Individuals pained by such emotion will move mountains to make their commemorative project happen"

The stimulus for this stream of consciousness is Marie Fatayi-Williams, who so eloquently paid tribute to her son who was killed in the London bus bombing last week. On Friday she announced that she will set up a foundation called The Anthony Fatayi-Williams Peace and Conflict Resolution Foundation in honour of her son. Presumably it will be charitable.

When I read this, I realised why there are so many charities. Individuals pained by such emotion will move mountains to make their commemorative project happen - even if there are other organisations that do similar work, with which they will be competing directly for funds, and whose competitive presence may in fact diminish the work of the whole movement.

I suspect the Charity Commission does this already, but shouldn't they be making more of an effort to look for similar organisations when faced with a familiar-sounding set of objectives? Maybe they could then recommend the applicant talks to those organisations. For example Mrs Fatayi-Williams could be directed to the Conflict, Development and Peace Network (CODEP) or International Alert or The International Association for Conflict Management.

But what do I know?

Olympics: small charities for the high jump

2005-07-15T16:10:00.001Z

Great, we got the Olympics. Not so great: smaller charities will inevitably suffer. The funds they usually get will divert to bullet trains and an 80,000-seater stadium.

As you probably know, many small charities rely heavily on grants or contracts with local or central government. They have to, since the money donated by the public is sucked up by the large charities which send us pens and which we therefore know. You haven't heard of most of them. And you certainly won't after 2012 because several of them are in for the chop.

"Some of the resources invested in East London will now not be available for regenerating other parts of the capital"

Most observers of the Olympics agree on one thing: it costs the host city a fortune to stage and, in most cases, a loss. This Forbes article has an ironic take on it.

Los Angeles is the only city which in recent years came out on top, largely because it didn't build anything new. London on the other hand will be starting from scratch on the Hackney Marshes. The scale of the plans is astonishing. As are the cost estimates. And according to this 1992 British Olympian, they're bound to grow.

It will bring work, visitors and nice housing to the poorest part of London. But London School of Economics specialist Tony Travers predicts, "Some of the resources invested in East London will now not be available for regenerating other parts of the capital. Within the local boroughs... there will be a steep addition to the cost of running basic services as 2012 approaches. There will be environmental improvements to fund, new facilities to run and, eventually, much litter to pick up. Not all of these costs will be met from Whitehall grants."

What to do? Adopting a local charity - smart advice in any case - is a good place to start.