When an emergency isn't an emergency
CALL US NAIVE, but we thought that giving to people caught up in particular emergencies would be a pretty easy thing to do. We thought you'd just call up a relevant charity, say you wanted to give some money for that particular cause, and then they'd send it there. But it's not that simple.
Just before Christmas, we wanted to find out how to help people affected by the typhoon in the Philippines.
Well, it turns out that you can't - unless you're prepared to organize an international bank-transfer to the International Federation of the Red Cross in Geneva, and pay the whopping accompanying fees.
The other approach that had a slight chance of helping would be to give to the British Red Cross's disaster fund - some of which had already been given to help their international colleagues in the Philippines. But there's no guarantee that this is where your money would be spent.
6 comments:
I think it is a bad idea to give to one particular emergency anyway. If a large development charity is doing a good job, it would be allocating resources to where they can most efficiently help. So giving them untied funds is much better as a giver, your money will have more of an impact.
It's unusual, but remember during the Tsunami two years ago, the charities had to stop collecting money because they had more than they could usefully spend helping. That is a more obvious version of what must go on anyway if you give funds to just one emergency.
On the other hand, it's good if we, as givers, help the charities by carefully selecting what we give to based on how useful it is. I'm not sure though that giving by emergency is a good way of doing this - selecting smaller charities with different approaches would be more discriminating?
I agree with frabacus, but only up to a point. Charities have a habit of spending money on what you don't really want them to - like massive ad campaigns for their gift catalogues in the run-up to Christmas - and I don't want my money funding those, thanks very much. Although it's not perfect, I think giving direct to an appeal can be an effective way to give, if you want to control where your money's going.
mikew, which massive gift catalogue ad campaign have I missed?
Mikemuses, the answer is Oxfam. In London, they plastered the sides of buses with their hoardings, and no tube carriage was complete without one of their posters. What's more, these ads were totally misleading - they claimed that when you bought a gift from the catalogue, then one would be delivered to a poor farmer. But as IG pointed out, this isn't what happened.
Thanks Mikew, we didn't seem to have any billboards for them in my neck of the woods.
Perhaps less people for the money would have seen them, so they didn't run them here.
I'm personally still torn on the concept of 'giving a goat'.
Charities are always going to spend money on things that some people don't want their money spent on. Sometimes it makes more sense than a casual observer such as myself would think, and sometimes it's a calculated risk.
This is an interesting debate you are having. Probably the only way forward is to ask charities to publish transparent accounts, detailing exactly how much everything costs including administration. Sometimes this is very difficult to do as depending on the nature of the "emergency" the costs will vary. Perhaps by showing how much everything costs the donor will be able to understand the complexity of responding to disasters and emergencies. In the short-term however I suspect that it would probably only serve to fuel debate around admin and salary costs. Maybe I am too cynical!
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