It's easy to come up with a list of actions which put us off giving to the various charities, less easy to say what constitutes a good way to encourage us. I'll start with some observations on actions which discourage us.
We don't want to be asked too frequently. Or having unnecessary reminders of why I support them in the first place. We make an effort to choose charities which have aims we support and do what we think of as good work, and we generally feel we know what they do well enough not to need constant bombardment with letters and leaflets reminding us of why the charity itself considers its work important. This is aimed most at Friends of the Earth of the charities we have supported. They have started having their appeals on the outside of the envelope as well as inside, which is just silly - if it comes from FOTE, we're not likely to assume it's junk mail to be recycled without opening. Not only that, but the appeals tend to be very lengthy and hysterical in tone: we must have another £500,000 this month, or the world will come to an end! (This is the mailing which prompted this blog post, incidentally.) While agreeing that the environment is something which we need to sort out to continue living on this planet, I am not so convinced that one campaigning group is quite so important in the world, even if they are one of the more militant.
People give money to a charity because they want to help with the front line work they do. Unfortunately, a certain amount of administration is necessary for this work to be possible; it's unglamorous and people generally don't want to fund it, but it has to be done. Sometimes employing a high quality administrator behind the scenes could help the work far more than, say, sending food to a disaster area which doesn't reach the starving because it hasn't had paperwork correctly completed to pass through customs. Think of the recent case of the Baptist aid workers in Haiti after the earthquake at the beginning of 2010, who fell foul of the laws banning child trafficking when seeking to take children to be adopted out of the country (see Wikipedia article). If, as they claim, they were sincere in believing the children to be orphans, there must have been problems which could have been solved by a good administrator: checking the status of the children properly (not easy in a country devastated by an earthquake), arrangement of permits to take the children out of the country, and understanding of the legal position on the movement of children in Haiti. While charities should keep their administration costs to a minimum, we don't actually mind how the charity spends the money we give them. Sometimes, charities asking for money include a "how do you want this money to be spent?" query on their forms, and because we feel that admin can be important, and because we don't want emotional feelings about the latest widely publicised disaster (or initiative, or whatever) to take money away from other important work, we always select "in any suitable manner", which almost certainly means that the money goes on administration.
We're not unhappy about paying for administration, but we do feel it needs to be reasonably efficient. Sometimes a charity's administrative methods are so poor that it inhibits giving to them. Plantlife is a charity we want to support, but became unable to do so because they were so inefficient. Firstly we set up a direct debit, which they failed to collect. So we cancelled the direct debit, and sent them a cheque for annual membership and a donation. But then we started getting monthly letters saying that our subscription had lapsed because they'd been unable to process our payment because the direct debit hadn't been collectable. Of course it wasn't: we'd cancelled it when the cheque was cashed. After a year of emails and phone calls, each of which ended with their administrators saying that they'd sort the problem (after all, sending us monthly letters costs them money) which seemed to have no effect on the processing of the letters, we gave up, and took our money elsewhere. We've had charities failing to cash cheques before they expire, or having online giving pages which aren't at the places which they link to, or which don't use SSL to secure the transactions (how difficult is that going to be to set up in 2010?): none of these administrative issues encourage us to give money. If a charity can't manage their receipt of donations, how can they be trusted to efficiently use the money they do receive?
We don't necessarily want to read too much about the details of the work being done. We chose a charity to support because we have some idea of what we do, but sometimes the work is such that too many details become depressing. We know things are difficult for refugees around the world, but we don't need to know all the details of individual cases of hardship (Refugee Council), we know that human rights are abused by many governments, but we don't want to be depressed by just how difficult it can be to be a dissident even in 2010 (Amnesty), we know that life for those excluded from society even in a relatively rich country in the West is hard, but individual cases can be distressing (Salvation Army). I suppose we have got a duty to ensure our money isn't being misused as much as we can, but that isn't quite what I mean by this. Almost every charity produces some sort of magazine for supporters. Sometimes this has a campaigning brief, like Amnesty's, which is used to inspire the letter writing campaigns which have been so successful for them in the past in raising awareness. We're not really people who do much letter writing, so this kind of campaigning isn't our style, and we're not planning to stop giving any time soon, so we would like to have the option of not receiving the magazine, which costs money to produce and distribute, only for us to skim it and recycle it. A short email newsletter would be better suited to the way we want to interact with these social action charities. We have explained this to the Salvation Army, who took us off their magazine list, and to the Refugee Council, who took us off their list for a time but soon started sending the magazine again (the next time we sent money to support the work).
A lot of charities want to encourage their supporters to become involved in their work. For many people, this can be extremely rewarding: working at a local charity shop, volunteering at a local National Trust property, and so on. I've already mentioned that we aren't really suited to become involved in letter writing campaigns. We also have issues caused by a long term illness which make it virtually impossible to be involved in activities which require meeting other people. As a result of this, I work at home almost all the time, so I don't do much socialising with work colleagues. So we're not likely to become involved in many of these activities, even if it's just selling raffle tickets or running awareness raising events at work. (Other people there hold cake days, or run marathons, to aid their causes.) Because of this, we are perhaps more aware than most of how charities ask people to become involved, and think it wrong to be made to feel guilty for not doing more. In some ways, we feel that giving quite considerable sums of money should be enough! Raffle tickets are a case in point; we get sent these a lot, to sell to our friends, and we would prefer not to be. Even if our lifestyle permitted us to do this easily, it is not something we're comfortable doing.
We don't want to have money wasted on cheap trinkets as rewards for support. A lot of charities include pens with requests for donations, to make it easier to complete the form and return it. The Red Cross has sent me, over the last few years, address labels, pens, notelets, postcards, seeds and tea. While it is nice to be appreciated, we feel that this is a waste of money which could be better spent on the charity's work, especially as we are being sent far more than we can use. There are only so many address labels with pictures of flowers I can/want to use, after all!
On the other hand, charities can lose out by being too lackadaisical. The Musicians' Benevolent Fund is a charity I wanted to give to, to encourage young musicians, but it proved hard to track them down, and when we did, we kept on dropping off their mailing list entirely. They appear to have a policy of only sending out information to people who responded to the previous appeal, and we don't give to an individual charity frequently enough to do that.
Many charities send receipts and thank you letters for donations over a certain amount. It is nice to be appreciated - some of the charities send out Christmas cards to supporters, which is a nice way to show that they matter. But this isn't really necessary: we are quite happy to give money without thanks, feeling that the work is more important than spending money this way. We can make sure the donation has been received from our bank statements, after all. Realising that not all donors want a receipt, some charities include a box on the form to accompany donations to tick if a receipt is not required. However, if we tick the box, then the charity shouldn't send a receipt, and this doesn't always work. This is another administrative failure, and one which is particularly irritating, as we specifically followed a procedure they set only for the charity to get it wrong.
Two of the charities we support are ones which I would like to highlight as ones which get it right, at least as far as we're concerned. The first is the National Trust. They seem to have really good writers of appeals. Their letters are relatively infrequent, and take the tone "We have this wonderful opportunity - do you want to be part of it?" when many charities are asking "Bad things are/could be happening - help us do something them". This is encouraging rather than depressing, especially as they stand out against the crowd as a result. Charities like the Refugee Council should take note: instead of telling us how bad things are for the people they are trying to help, send us stories of how their work has helped someone, and how it could do so again. (To be honest, they may now be doing this: I've stopped reading their letters, just removing the donation forms and recycling the rest because they were so depressing.)
The second good example is the Salvation Army. As mentioned above, they actually stopped sending us their magazine when we asked them to, as it was a waste as we didn't have time to read it. Now we get two or three appeals a year, and are sent nice Easter and Christmas cards as recognition of our support.
So, if you want my money:
- don't ask me every five minutes
- don't send me large numbers of cheap "gifts"
- don't expect me to act as a fundraising or campaiging volunteer unless I tell you I want to do this
- do be positive about what you are doing with the money
- do administer my giving effectively and efficiently
- do keep in touch
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