meeting in the aisle

When does a charity not deserve your donations?

It’s Sunday evening and I’m sitting in the lounge room with my flat mates drinking red wine, eating strawberries and listening to Johnny Cash. It’s a wonderful night, summer-lite, the light fading into evening, and the smell of Christmas is all through the air courtesy of the real Christmas tree gracing the corner of the room.

So it’s not the right night for me to be getting worked up about an article pushed into my Google Reader stream by the crowdsourcing site Digg, but there you go.

Why the Salvation Army Doesn’t Deserve Your Money is a typical anti-donation story, one I’ve read many times over and is certainly not a unique argument being waged against The Salvation Army alone. Excuses to hang on to your hard-earned are everywhere. But this kind of argument really gets me going. Because I believe in putting your ‘money where your mouth is’, so to speak (terrible analogy, but let me go with it), I left a comment on the article itself, and have reproduced it here:

comment by Lyrian:

While I agree with you that the Salvation Army’s stance against same-sex relationships renders them unworthy of donations, I object to the argument that “overhead costs” and “political lobbying” are reasons not to give.

The fact is that NO business can operate without administration, and no good business – which charities are expected to be the very best at – can operate without well-resourced administration which supports hiring qualified staff, accurate and transparent accounting, monitoring and evaluation, development and retention of staff which saves money over the long term and is essential for program delivery, and even more straightforward things like communications. Charities should be measured on the OUTCOMES of their programs, not the amount they spend on achieving them.

As for lobbying governments? I argue that organisations who deal with issues like homelessness, drug addiction, poverty, health etc every single day are best placed to advise governments on the development of legislation and support programs rather than politicians themselves who have spent their entire lives balancing the ledger of friends and fans with an intensity even Mark Zuckerberg would be proud of.

Don’t agree with a charity’s stance on something? Absolutely – don’t donate to them. But reasons like ‘administration’ and ‘lobbying’ are genuine expenses for charities and are poor ways of measuring effectiveness.

Agree? Disagree? What do you think?

Related post: All you ever do is ask! ask! ask!

Is ‘The Amazing Race’ really better than poverty porn?

There is quite a debate raging at the moment about poverty porn and the negative imagery and stereotypes many charities use to raise money.

Over at Wronging Rights there is a discussion about the positive portrayal of “the real Ghana” in the American reality TV show The Amazing Race (TAM) acting as an ‘antidote to poverty porn.’

I recently saw the episode where contestants go to Dhaka, Bangladesh, and I was also impressed with the depiction of one of the most populous cities in the world where poverty is visible on every street.

Wronging Rights praises TAM for showing Americans struggling to do things Ghanains do every day, showing a positive and cheerful side of Ghana, and showing realities like traffic jams and homes with TVs.

In Ghana, TAR confounds expectations by doing the exact opposite. It (a) shows bumbling Americans; (b) highlights the lives of Ghanaians in Ghana; (c) rejects poverty porn. - Wronging Rights

There is an acknowledgment that the comments coming out of the mouths of some of the contestants are pretty awful:

“I hope I get to hold little African babies” - a female contestant.

But there is much support for the depiction of a different side of Ghana than one portrayed by fundraising charities (I use ‘different’ as opposed to ‘real’ because there are many versions of the ‘real’ sides of places - but that’s a whole other blog post on its own).

My problem with this argument is that this TV show does a better job at portraying people living in Africa than charities who use poverty porn because it is like comparing apples to oranges - we’re talking about completely different things.

The purpose of The Amazing Race is to entertain. It is not a documentary, it is a competition, and it most certainly not reality.

How can this be compared to a fundraising appeal which seeks to raise the money needed to fund aid projects? While it is wonderful to think that portraying entertaining, happy, funny images of developing countries and that being enough to inspire people to dig into their pockets - fundraising departments are often skeptical at how effective this would really be.

I want to be clear here that I am just as disappointed at poverty porn myself, (and have said so here and here), but I think this comparison between an entertainment show and fundraising appeals is unfair and unrealistic.

What would be more helpful in progressing the charity world on from relying on poverty porn would be more examples of charities raising substantial amounts of money and support using positive imagery.

To start, I suggest looking at the way Charity:water fundraises. Right now their landing page doesn’t have a single image of sad looking people living in poverty. It’s the same story with their christmas appeal and even when they are informing you about the problems of dirty water, they manage to do it without a single heart-wrenching image.

Kudos to you (yet again), Charity:water…

What makes us give? The Wikipedia example

A life working for not-for-profits means constantly thinking of new and innovative ways to encourage people to dip their hands into their pockets (just a little bit deeper, please). While I love the idea of people giving based on informed decisions and gratitude, this little Wikipedia experiment shows that guilt and gore are here to stay.

NB to well-meaning charity, the ‘poverty porn’ approach is still not okay.

Via Information is Beautiful

Weekend reader - links I loved

This week’s collation of things I loved from my little corner of the webiverse is brought to you by hayfever hell. Antihistimines required.

• I wax and wane between liking commentaries on “what the internet is doing to us.” I found this so achingly sad and alarmingly resonant for me:

To be on the internet is to never be alone. I haven’t succumbed to amorphous feelings of isolation since sophomore year of college. For years now, this has been a pillar of my dignity, a tenant of my self-respect. Sophomore year of college was the last time I remember attending a party I didn’t want to go to in spite of myself, the last time I remember choosing people I didn’t really like over solitude. How dumb of me to think that I don’t do this online every day now.

- Alice Gregory, Sad as hell (via Something Changed)

• In keeping with the theme of our generation and the internet, Zadie Smith has weighed in. Predictably, she finds social media wanting for its contraction of our selves. I don’t agree, and neither does Jessica Au:

“Our Twitter handles and Facebook profiles carefully crafted characters – they are our aspirational selves, selective autobiographies in 140 characters or less – and as such can never be said to be a complete loss of privacy”.
- Jessica Au, Meanland.

• Do you read Sugar? You should. She’s a goddess.

• Meanwhile, has torture become just a matter of taste?

“What we choose to define as torture is now just another policy disagreement, like extending the Bush tax cuts or picking a caterer.”
- Dahlia Lithwick for Slate (via The Awl)

• Have you ever wondered how authors feel about their book covers? 

“The Arabic on the cover, she said, had made her nervous when reading in public. She knew it was shameful, but she covered up the Arabic whenever she read the book outside her house. The cover, she admitted, helped her recognise the depths of her own fears and prejudices. That’s the moment I realised that this bold and powerful cover beautifully mirrors the aims of the pages within.”
- Author Moustafa Bayoumi at Creative Industries (via Meanjin)

• I am conflicted about direct giving schemes which encourage you to buy a family a water kit, or mosquito net, because I think the best form of giving is a regular donation. But I still really do find them appealling. Even more so after watching Where’s my goat?

• Speaking of giving, do you think giving is hard too?

“Doing good is harder than it looks. Good intentions are not enough…As I look forward to the future of philanthropy, both mine and others’, it’s an exciting picture. There will be new discoveries about the nature of giving, and as the nonprofit sector grows daily more interested in measuring impact, the number of opportunities to give effectively grows with it.
- Ian Turner at Give Well (via Poverty Action)

• Calling all public speakers, please don’t do this! - Chris Brogan

• My my, Google sounds like a good place to work. Still.

• Also, do you write letters and words and phrases that form poetry? Overland would like to hear from you. Hey, you might even win.

And finally, according to Laughing Squid:

All you ever do is ask, ask ask!

This Saturday I had the good fortune of meeting new and interesting people while soaking up the views of the Torquay coastline on a magical spring Saturday. It should have been a laugh, a real hoot, and for the most part it was (the view went something like this, after all).

Torquay, Victoria

Between the sharp intakes of breath at the beauty, though, we got to talking about aid and development and poverty and footballers and sexual assault and gladiators and the gender delusion. (Yes, I’m a real hoot - you should invite me ‘round for dinner…)

One thing my new friend Mat said while we talked about all these uplifting things has stuck more than everything else. When I mentioned I worked for a charity, he said,

“all charities do is ask and ask and ask…”

And not in a good way.

He’s right too. That’s exactly what charities do. In an environment where charities are expected to run on the smell of an oily rag, barely adequately resourced, and always facing some kind of emergency - asking others for help is what gets us over the line.

But here’s the thing - not every day is an emergency, but every new day of operating costs money. Charities need to raise enough money not only to function in a crisis, but to mitigate crises before they happen, and be in better positions to respond adequately when they do. All of this costs money.

It costs money to hire quality staff, to train them, and to provide ongoing career development. It costs money to provide the tools staff need to do their jobs effectively. It costs money to follow best practice research and development, to monitor and evaluate programs, to plan over the long term, and to communicate with people both internally and outside the organisation. And that’s all before we get to program delivery itself.

But no one wants to give a charity money to run its business. The folk at Charity:Water know this, which is why they tell you 100% of their donations go into their water programs (and not on running the administration side of things). Technically this approach reads a bit like spin because they have secured major donor funding to cover the administration side, which is still a donation - but the approach works.

People like to think of charities as something akin to an envelope - a carrier of goods rather than the goods themselves.

Personally, I’m pretty conflicted about this. I know that running an effective charity is the same as running any other type of business. You need to invest in staff and administration to get things done, and that becomes a hell of a lot easier when you have a fairly reliable source of income.

But this is hard when the majority of people only reach into their pockets during an emergency. We like to hear that it is our dollar, our donation, our action that is going to make the difference to a cause, and that it is needed right now, or something drastic will happen.

Which means charities act like every day is an emergency, and we ask for your help to rescue us (and thus our cause - which is really your cause) every day too.

While I agree with my friend that being asked for things all the time is challenging, and frustrating, and even boring, I also know I have to take some of the responsibility for that myself.

When I think about the issue of giving this way, I can see how the most valuable donation of all would be for me to become a regular donor to my charities of choice, rather than waiting for an emergency. Although I give 5% of my yearly wage to charities - I give in lump sums, often in response to appeals, and in an ad-hoc manner. But I should stop this. It would be far more beneficial if the charities I support knew when to expect my money.

If I trust the work they do, then I also trust them to decide the best way to spend the money I give them.

As tempting as it is to want to feel like I am personally providing a mosquito net to a family, maybe the most effective thing my money can do would be to help hire a new staff member to answer the phone. Or learn a new computer program. You get my point.

The added bonus of this approach, of course, is that if more of us approached giving to charities this way, there would be less need for the constant asks.

And just like that a day at the beach has sparked one thing I’m going to change this week for the better. Thank you Torquay, you were everything.

Does it have to be about me all the time?

We’ve heard it all before. YOU can save a life. YOU can make a difference. YOU can feed a child. YOU can make someone see again. YOU can change the world. It’s a message I have grown up with, from the days of the World Vision ads of starving babies and sing-along tunes of Live Aid, and is something I’ve internalised so completely it has influenced the direction of my whole life.

Which is great. It really is.

But what now? What’s next? What happens when I don’t want it to be about me? I’m doing fine. I know I can change the world. I know the little things all add up to big things. I’m engaged! I’m committed! I’m active!

Is this the tide starting to turn, I wonder? Is it time cause communicators start zooming out again, at least for “the converted” supporters, to stay ahead of the curve?

Is it time for new conversations which acknowledge Gen Y is growing up and that hey, maybe it doesn’t have to be about me all the time?

p.s. this is part of my overall attempts to question the things I have come to accept about the aid/development/activism sector. Yesterday I asked myself if I have internet cause fatigue. Do you?

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*Drink this…

thephilanthropyfactory:

* DO NOT drink this…obviously we wouldn’t, so why let someone else??? click on the bottle to help.

Choose Change: ATMs that pay

I hope the Choose Change idea makes it to Australia sometime soon (via PSFK)