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.)

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.

At the start of this year researchers at Berkeley and San Diego were doing a study into how profitable spamming could be. They set up a fake online pharmacy which was just like the real thing, offering prescription-only drugs. They counted how many people visited the site and added drugs to their basket. The only point at which the customers discovered that it was not actually working was when they submitted their credit-card details, at which point they got an error page.

So, the Edinburgh researchers probably included the Berkeley researchers in their study, and vice versa, unless they warned each other, which seems unlikely. It’s like a collaborative version of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle – Whenever you try to measure something by doing anything on the web you are probably affecting someone else’s measurements at the same time.

It may sometimes be expedient for a man to heat the stove with his furniture. But he should not delude himself by believing that he has discovered a wonderful new method of heating his premises.

Nevertheless this is exactly the economic model that pretty much everyone apparently believes in at the moment. It seems to be the unanimous view of both journalists and politicians that we need the banks to start lending again in order to get the economy moving. But some of the banks are in trouble because of their imprudent and greedy business practices and so now all the banks are being extra-cautious and won’t lend. So the favoured solution is for governments to give the banks yet more money in the hope that they will lend it out to people. To go back to Ludwig von Mises, this is still not a wonderful method of heating; it’s just the government buying more furniture. Nobody is prepared to say the truth, which is that lots of people are going to have to accept a prolonged lowering of their standard of living.

Anyway, someone said that Mr Paxman should read more Burns so that he could understand the poet’s great insight better and it got me thinking. Isn’t it about time someone produced a decent Burns anthology in translation? All the translations I’ve ever seen make him seem prosaic and shallow when the picturesque language is stripped away. Come on Seamus Heaney, let’s settle this once and for all!

The school my daughters go to has a terrible website. Not only does it look bad but also it can only be updated by someone knowledgeable going in to the school during school hours and sitting on a tiny chair to do the typing. This means the content is very stale and thus mostly useless.

So I suggested a site hosted on an external server that could be easily updated by anyone. Great, they said, let’s do it. I did it. The site was running by March 2007. I didn’t want to provide the content so a couple of people involved in the school volunteered to take over the actual running of the thing. I showed them how to use WordPress and off they went.

Time passed. The summer holidays passed. I contacted them and asked them if there was anything I could do to help. Eventually they showed me what they had done. They had produced quite a big report about the site. It said how often various sections should be updated, who would be responsible, how the navigation could be organised. The site itself was unchanged. In fact, Google analytics told me that nobody has visited it at all for several months. The site is still sitting there, unused. I’ve edited a few things – the term dates are correct now. It only took me five minutes.

Fast forward to nowadays. My dear friends at Stan’s Cafe, a trendy theatre company in Birmingham, had a big meeting last week to talk about their future. One of the things they decided to do was to experiment with some kind of private forum for keeping people in the company informed about upcoming shows and maybe to promote more discussion between members. I offered the director, James, a couple of options: A wiki and a Bulletin Board. He went for the latter, it’s already live, the members are being added today. The meeting took place exactly 7 days ago.

The Stan Talk forum might be a success, it might not. If it’s useful it will thrive, if it isn’t it will wither and die. It doesn’t really matter either way because we didn’t spend too long making it and it didn’t cost much. The school site has already had many more words written about it than it will ever contain. Maybe it will serve a useful purpose one day but it won’t be there to impress the OFSTED inspector who is coming on Thursday.

I’m tempted to conclude that this is the difference between effective organisations and ineffective ones. But I know that the school is very well run, the leadership is excellent and they handle the business of schooling children very well. It’s the accompanying bureaucracy that cripples their ability to move quickly and act decisively.

I’m not sure what the moral of the story is, apart from watch out if you ever get asked to work with a Local Education Authority. Make sure you don’t rely on them to make any decisions and don’t allow them to have any role that could impede your progress because it they can, they will.