Charity Shops

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.)