Over the past few years, I’ve steadily increased the amount I donate to charities. Rewind to 5+ years ago, my donations used to consist of a a few coins at the local Temple and supporting a few friends doing various challenges and raising money through Just Giving.
But then something changed.
Contributing to society started becoming a lot more important and doing good for good’s sake started occupying more and more of my thoughts. Contributing financially to charity was one part of this “new” me. But just randomly contributing like I was at the moment, wasn’t going to cut it. Following a discussion on the topic, my wife and I decided that we should have a target of what percentage of our net income should go to charities of our choosing. That magic number is set at 10%. We’re no where near there yet, but on that journey. As of December 2016, we were at 2.5%. Though I want to get to 10%, I don’t want there to be a substantial impact on our way of living so the we have decided on a gradual progression towards that number.
The more I thought about charities, the more I noticed I wasn’t as preoccupied with “administration costs” of any particular charity as I would have been a few years ago. This silly notion of how much of my money goes into administration assumes that I am experienced in the best way to run a charity.
If I asked myself the question: what ultimately is a charity there to do? Move as much of the donated funds towards the people it supports as possible?
No.
That’s not it.
A charity, I propose, runs to deliver the best outcomes for the people it supports as possible…[and here’s the clincher]….in whatever way is the best to achieve this.
That means administration fees shouldn’t matter. That means how much its executives get paid shouldn’t matter. That means how much is spent on marketing and advertising shouldn’t matter. That means if it spends money on something other than putting it into the hands of the needy, it isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
There are two questions we should be asking:
- Are you delivering the best outcomes for your cause with the resources you have?
- How are you making the most of your resources?
If spending money on marketing doesn’t sit right with you, ask yourself why you feel this way? Do you know why Coca Cola spend money on marketing, or any other for-profit company for that matter? Its not because they like to, its because they know that to get the word about their product out there, to keep their product in the minds of their customers, to sell more product, they HAVE to. They know that careful spending on marketing activities, produces far more money income for them, i.e. for every £1 they spend on marketing, they make many more times that back in return.
If you could spend £100 on something that gave you £500 back, wouldn’t you do it? Of course you would. Then why do we frown when a charity tries to do the same? If for very £10 we donate to a charity, they used it to bring in £50, surely that’s a good thing. An extra £40 than we were willing or able to donate! Thats £40 more in delivering outcomes for their cause, be it people, animals or whatever the charity stands for.
Our outdated, illogical attitudes towards how we think charities should operate fails them. We don’t let them grow. We don’t let them do what needs to be done to solve the big problems of this world. We starve them of the best talent in this world because we don’t like it if they pay for higher salaried staff.
When a high-flying graduate comes out of university, they have a choice. Do good and join the third-sector but accept a modest salary, or join the for-profit sector and have a chance to earn a higher salary. Even if they want to commit their working lives to the third-sector, they can only do that by sacrificing their economical futures. Would you make that career-long sacrifice for you and your family?
And so, at young ages, charities lose the skills, experience and drives of young, ambitious minds.
The above are just a few examples of how we, as a society, force charities to keep their indirect costs low, even if this isn’t in their best interests. And because we focus on it when selecting a charity, we indirectly make them focus on it too. Spending less than 20 minutes watching this TED talk by Dan Pallotta opened my mind, and now my eyes and mind are open to this attitude, going back to the old way of thinking is, thankfully, impossible.
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