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Do you have any figures to back that up? Most charities here in the UK publish their expense ratios (i.e. how much is spent on admin, fundraising, on the actual
by pwaring 15y ago
Do you have any figures to back that up? Most charities here in the UK publish their expense ratios (i.e. how much is spent on admin, fundraising, on the actual good cause etc.) and they tend to be fairly efficient.
- nodata 15y agoA lot of big charities in the UK employee "clipboard-nazis" near busy shopping areas to get people to sign up and make you feel guilty if you don't. These people normally earn 25 GBP per sign-up (which takes on average 10 months to recover iirc). Other charities spam you with mailings. Now clearly this works: they are raising more money this way, but the side effect is that people like me refuse to give to a charity that hassles me every time I go to the supermarket, and spams me every time I give them money.
- neilk 15y agoThese days, that is generally done through an intermediary firm. I don't think many charities hire their own clipboard-wielding youths, so they wouldn't be counted as employees. By the way, I had some trouble figuring out the right term to put into a search engine. Turns out the industry term for this is "face-to-face street fundraising". And in the UK it's sometimes called "charity mugging" or even "chugging", which you have to admit is more amusing than going straight to Godwin...
- pwaring 15y agoSome charities do employ their own staff, because they want greater control over the process and staff who know about the charity, rather than agency staff who might be 'selling' a different charity each week. Even if they're an agency, the ones I know of are paid hourly, not per sign-up.
- emw 15y agoThere's a pie chart titled 'Where Your Money Goes' displayed on the donation page (http://www.archive.org/donate/index.php http://www.archive.org/donate/index.php). Expense ratios for Internet Archive: Programs: 88% Administration: 10% Fundraising: 2%
- maxerickson 15y agoIt's probably hard to successfully argue against vagueness like 'most' and 'excessive', but Charity Navigator pulls together lots of information: http://www.charitynavigator.org http://www.charitynavigator.org My takeaway is that there are plenty of large charities that spend more than 90% of their revenues on their mission and plenty that don't. For me, the big ones that do 90% makes it hard to feel great about a smaller charity that only hits 70% (but then I am a crank that dislikes solicitation).
- newscasta 15y agoThere's an interesting article on lesswrong about efficient charity. It's not really about the expense ratios but the impact of the donation. http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gj/efficient_charity_do_unto_others/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gj/efficient_charity_do_unto_others...