The Big City

I read an article a few years ago about how most charity shops don’t make a profit, they are just there to raise awareness of the charity by providing a permanent and cheap advertising billboard on the High Street. The guy who wrote it suggested that people would be better off selling their unwanted clothes on eBay and donating the money directly to a cause they cared about.

The British Heart Foundation produced a story today, picked up rather uncritically by the BBC, about how many of the clothes donated to charities end up being sold to commercial traders. It’s not a new story, the BBC actually made a programme about a very similar issue back in 2006. The BHF doesn’t seem to have actually published the specific details of the research that the story is based on, despite the many statistics quoted in their film, and they don’t mention on their site whether or not they sell unwanted donations on to commercial traders. It will be interesting to see whether those charities they’re indirectly criticising will respond to what they’ve said.

Transparency is always a difficult issue for charities. The harsh reality of the work they do is often at odds with the cosy world that their donors like to imagine. Competition is fierce and they worry that any story that raises even the faintest anxiety in the minds of their donors will cause them to switch to some other organisation.

Many people working in the media come from a similar background to those working for charities. Journalists working in the field often rely on their charity contacts for help with stories and logistics. This personal relationship, coupled with a reluctance to criticise people who are obviously well-meaning, makes it hard for reporters to properly examine the work of charities. Most interviews I hear start off with “Oh no, really? That’s terrible, what are you doing to help?” with follow-up questions that are entirely unchallenging. When there is even the slightest suggestion that things on the ground aren’t as clear-cut as the charities would like us to imagine, such as last year’s story about some Band Aid money being diverted to buy weapons in Ethiopia, the charities fly into a fury.

This aversion to scrutiny comes partly from the fact that charities employ a whole army of professional PR and advertising people. These professionals are entirely focussed on delivering results for their employers. They may not care if the new donors they recruit have simply switched from another charity and they are not interested in whether or not the charity is actually effective in accomplishing what it says it will. They just want people to sign up, and they will always advise their clients to avoid complexity and controversy and to challenge criticism aggressively.

So we, as potential donors, have a problem. The public face of the charities we support is created by professional marketers, not by the well-meaning people we think we’re supporting. The effectiveness of those organisations is not scrutinised by the media, and government charity watchdogs are only concerned with fraud and misappropriation. So who can we trust to tell us the truth about what happens to our donations?

The article I mentioned at the start of this post was on a site called Intelligent Giving which provided exactly the sort of scrutiny that is needed. Unfortunately it closed down, I don’t know why, and has been taken over by New Philanthropy Capital who are focussed on supplying help to charities rather than to donors. You can still find some tasters of the kind of hard-hitting work they did on their mothballed blog. The other sites available in the UK, such as Philanthropy UK, are much more equivocal. If you want some up-to-date help in finding effective ways of giving you’ll have to look to the U.S.

GiveWell has several excellent resources including a Giving 101 which includes reasons to give as well as reasons not to, and an explanation of why the wrong donation can accomplish nothing at all. Charity Navigator is another interesting site. They have some great top 10′s, including this list of charities which spend more than half their budget paying professional fundraisers! It’s a real shame there isn’t an equivalent site for UK charities, I’m sure more people would give more money if they didn’t suspect that it would be wasted.

(Disclaimer: Although I work for the BBC I didn’t work on any of the stories mentioned above. These are my personal views and nothing to do with the Corporation.)

The government of Israel has a policy of assassinating political leaders in Gaza. That means that the people who have ended up in charge of Hamas are the violent nutters rather that anyone who might be interested in a political solution. If the British government had shown this kind of clumsy disrespect for the rule of law in the 1980′s (and let’s face it they came close) then Gerry Adams and his colleagues wouldn’t have been around for any kind of peace process and we’d still be waging a war in Northern Ireland against the throwbacks who eventually became the Real IRA.

Even so, despite being idiots Hamas can fairly reasonably claim to be a legitimate party of government in Gaza because they were kind of voted in. They are committed to armed conflict against Israel, that is the ticket they ran on and that is what people voted for. Which is fair enough. I don’t think they should be described as terrorists, they are entitled to go to war if they want to. It does mean, though, that the awful casualties that the Israelis caused in their retaliation are not a ‘disaster’. They are casualties of war. Describing it as a disaster, as though it couldn’t be avoided, is dishonest.

So I agree with the BBC’s recent decision not to show a fundraising film on behalf of the Disasters Emergency Committee. While I hate to have to agree with the annoying Mark Thompson I think that he’s right when he says:

…Gaza remains a major ongoing news story, in which humanitarian issues – the suffering and distress of civilians and combatants on both sides of the conflict, the debate about who is responsible for causing it and what should be done about it – are both at the heart of the story and contentious.

People say that the BBC should trust the judgement of the charities who make up the DEC. Why? The people who work for charities are only human, they can be corrupt, incompetent or wrong just like anyone else. And because their credibility depends on maintaining a pristine image they don’t publicise their failings. They also have their own biases. Just because the DEC thinks that aid can be delivered safely and without being diverted by Hamas that doesn’t mean it can be. It is reasonable for the BBC to be sceptical about their claims.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t think people should give money to the DEC, of course they should if they want to. But BBC news isn’t there to tell people how to react to what’s going on, it’s just there to report the story. Reporting the suffering of the people of Gaza is the right thing to do in a news programme. Showing a film afterwards which is specifically designed to tug on the heart strings and raise money isn’t. We all know that when there stop being developments in the story it will stop dominating the headlines and yet the suffering will go on. That is the right time to show a fund-raising film, not now.