Quote of the day @justgiving
January 29th, 2010 | 
Author: BBC have a nice article about online giving which mentions the very wonderful Justgiving. They go at lengths to explain that although companies like Justgiving charge for their payment processing services they actually save charities money by consolidating the payment processing and doing it cheaper than the charities could do it themselves. If you give your money direct to a charity you aren’t giving it to an organisation entirely staffed by volunteers, it still costs money to employ them to process your donation. Even so, one bright spark has commented thus:
It’s good to finally see a big not-for-profit player in this market. Regardless of how well the charities have done out of the existence of JustGiving & co, it always grates when making charitable donations to be handing a cut to a for-profit business.
Peyman, London
Dude, words fail me. Even if you ring up a charity direct you are going to be costing them:
- A portion of the cost of the donation phone line
- A portion of the wages of the person writing down your bank details and punching it into a machine
- The payment processing costs which are paid to the card companies
- A portion of the wages of the person who posts off the information to HMRC to claim the gift aid
- A portion of the wages of the accounts people who keep track of it all and auditors who make sure it’s legit
- If you donate via the charity’s website you’re looking at server and maintenance costs as well as hosting and bandwidth, plus most of the above
For a small charity that’s just not practical and those that attempt it themselves can expect to end up spending more than if they got Justgiving to do it for them.
Posted in Quote of the Day
“I can’t shift the uneasy feeling that the move to online giving has detracted from the reason for the fundraising. “Click and give” may be more efficient at raising money, but the engagement in the charitable purpose is much lower. The giver is often more motivated about supporting the person in their endeavour (such as the marathon or climbing the mountain etc) than the charity they have nominated – surely this is an unhealthy trend?
James, London, UK”
C’mon James, that’s what sponsorship events have been about since the beginning of time. If my friend wants to run a marathon for a cause that’s important to him then I don’t need to give a toss about the cause myself, I’m donating money to support my friend in their efforts to raise money for something they feel is important.
Sponsorship is a celebration of the effort that a person is putting in. I know of a bloke who ran 365 marathons in a year back in 2006, that’s one a day for the mathematically challenged. As it happens his cause is something that I am keen to support but even if it wasn’t I think the effort is worthy of a tenner of my “hard earned”.
http://www.marathon365.org/
And while we’re on the subject of charidee, would anyone thinking of buying Simon Fucking Cowell’s dog-awful version of “Everybody Hurts” just send the money direct to the charity of their choice instead.
Actually, if anyone is thinking of buying that record could they please smash their genitals with a spade and take themselves out of the gene pool.
I had the pleasure of meeting Jon and Tracy Morter last week and I just wanted to hug them the whole time.
But that would have been weird.
For them.