Giving to charities is obviously Good and not Bad – but which charities should we give to and how much and how often?
From putting a penny in an old man’s cap, as the song goes, to staging a charity ball, the range is vast, and most of us have to tackle occasional telephone calls that have an uncanny tendency to come when we’re in the bath.
Then there is the endless stream of leaflets. I counted the ones I’d received over a year, and it was more than a couple of hundred; this must surely be inefficient when you think of all the ones that yield nothing. And, for the kind people with limited money who think they’d better give something to each, it ensures that far more money goes into admin than if they gave big and once.
Well, at least there seems to be a move to regulate the extent to which charities can badger their supporters, especially when it’s done by telephone. There is to be a new fundraising regulator, which you can ask to remove you from any particular list. But who is going to pay for this new regulator? Charities which spend more than £100,000 a year on fundraising from the public…
Apparently the average yield of charitable postal appeals, with the cost of the gifts that go with some of them, the glossy photographs, all that clever presentation, is a mere 5% which, according to a friend of mine who is regarded as the queen of direct marketing, is actually considered quite a good score in the commercial world.
It’s all so hard and unpleasant. It’s almost enough to make you glad that so many other things that we need – roads, police, firefighters, judges – are simply financed by taxes.
What do you think? Have your say below
