The " Charity " Dollar !

The cost of sending a letter recently increased from seventy cents to a dollar because the flow of mail decreases year after year and the post office is now running at a loss.  Of course companies that run a business that involves bulk mailings negotiate special rates but even so it is surprising the amount of mail arriving in the average home letterbox that is an appeal from a charity pleading for a donation.

There are a lot of companies out there which make their living by compiling lists of people which they on-sell to commercial interests, including charities.  One such gimmick recently used the Qantas logo and the promise of free air fares to entice people to provide their details.  Of course nobody got any airline seat tickets, but all respondents were bombarded with telemarketers trying to sell insurance and other items.

It also seems to be a fact of life that if you do make a donation to some worthy charity the flow of appeals from other charities seems to mysteriously increase soon after.  It seems that the list of people who have made a donation becomes a valuable commercial trading item and many charities sell their donor list on the open market to increase their money flow.

Charity collecting is now big business.  Most approaches are the work of paid advertising consultants and there is a disturbing new trend of appeal letters containing gifts in the hope of obligating the receiver to donate.  Initially, this used to take the form of a personalised name and address label that the user might stick on the back of outgoing mail, but in recent times the value has increased.  Sometimes it is expensive looking pens, or a selection of birthday or Christmas cards.   There seems to be a race to offer the most appealing gift.

The danger here is that an increasing amount of whatever we choose to donate does not find it's way to whatever task the charity is trying to help, but gets absorbed in the costly business of seeking donations.  Often, the biggest part of the charity budget is concentrated on ensuring the incoming money flow and only a mere fraction gets spent on alleviating the misery of the intended victims.

No doubt most charities are indeed worthy causes, but the problem is that there are just too many of them.  Obviously, a portion of the outgoing appeals receive a response, otherwise that approach would cease, but we have no way of knowing how many cents in our charity dollar go into the "advertising budget "of the charity concerned - and how much is spent on "operational funds ".

It is hoped that all charities are subjected to exactly the same auditing procedures that apply to other commercial interests and part of that audit should determine exactly what percentage of every donated dollar reaches the target to which it is intended - and that should be a legislated requirement on all charity literature.

As things stand, the public makes a donation decision with very little knowledge beyond the name and intended purpose of the charity.  It would be helpful if a judgement of that charities effectiveness could be made part of every approach and the obvious standard would be a measure of how much of each charity dollar reached it's target.

That could quickly become the gold standard in attracting donations.  It would sort the efficient charities out from those that just churn out begging letters and have high overheads that absorb much of received donations.   More to the point, it is a task that many donors expect from a diligent government to ensure that their charity donations are not wasted.