My mom kept regular contact with a child in Africa she sponsored though an agency like that. She was able to correspond with him all through him graduating from a local high school-equilvalent parochial school. I doubt the charity was trying so hard to deceive people that they keep fake corresponding with my mom for 5 years. She got updated pictures as well. That would be a pretty elaborate scheme if they weren’t real.
Or maybe I am naive?
I sponsored two children through Children International, and I got photos, letters and “status reports” at least once a year. I thought the money went into a general fund, but I was told when I started sponsoring that I shouldn’t give more than the agreed-upon amount each month, because they have to spend whatever money you send on your child (and his or her family), and if your child has more stuff than the other children in the area, it creates resentment among neighbors, some of whom do not have a sponsored kid, so…
Of course I don’t know if that’s just Children International, or whether they still have the same policy, but if they’re telling you NOT to give them more money… (They are still trying to get me to sponsor another child, though, now that the two I sponsored have grown up and finished the program, even though I told them when the second one finished that I didn’t want the emotional turmoil of another sponsorship.)
In point of fact - they do know what happens to the animals, since they keep track of them for breeding and follow up purposes. They also keep track of the families in the program and the conditions at their villages. They just aren’t going to send you thank you notes and pictures of your goat’s first day at school.
The money you donate is kept in a separate fund for each animal type. Heifer doesn’t run out and buy a new sheep for each sheep donation, for example. They source the animals through agreements with local ranchers and breeders. So they can estimate, for example, how many new sheep they can give out each year, how many breeding animals they’ll need, how much for vet care and so on. Then the fund in the Sheep Account goes toward paying their overall costs for the sheep ranching part of the outfit.
If they have a run on sheep, but their goats aren’t selling, then they will use the extra money from the Sheep Account to help cover the shortfall in the Goat Account.
I agree that Heifer spends an awfully lot on advertising, but aside from that, giving out animals and trying to promote modern agriculture is always going to be less cost effective than just handing out peanut butter and rice. Heifer is trying to provide a long term solution, not just immediate relief. The cost & benefits may not be obvious for years to come.
A FOAF recently actually went to visit the kid they sponsored- taking his same aged daughter to meet her. For that scheme, the money went mainly to the local school, together with a few other community things, while one of the students basically acted as a pen pal.
So yeah, there was a real kid, and they were benefitting from the money sent, just not solely.
And that’s why I give to them…because I believe in long term solutions.
IIRC, in the beginning you used to get a photo of your goat and the recipient, but that became a pain in the neck for them once they got bigger.
I don’t mind their policies at all; my kids enjoy picking out the animals to give each year and it’s a chance for me to talk with them about how lucky we are that our well-being doesn’t depend on whether we can get some chickens to raise for eggs.
YMMV
A few thoughts:
The “child sponsorship” model is well known to be deeply flawed, and most reputable organizations dropped it long ago. Why is it so bad? All kinds of reasons. It’s extremely labor intensive to identify individual families, manage the funds, and monitor that they are being used correctly. This has to be done on a local level, and it’s practically asking for corruption and favoritism regarding who gets what. It can create resentment in the community. But most of all, it doesn’t really lead to much actual “development.” Real development programs tend to focus on the community level, because that’s where you can create sustainable programs that fix a broken system. For example, if you dig a well, all kinds of good things happen- education increases as students and teachers aren’t spending so much time home sick, economic productivity increases, girls spend less time fetching water and more time studying, etc. Done right, a project can create a cascade of positive changes, and child sponsorship doesn’t tend to have that effect.
The “child sponsorship” model is GREAT for fundraising. Nobody wants to think their donation is going to stuff as unglamorous as rent and paying the secretaries. Heck, people don’t even like giving to boring public health and education projects, even if they are objectively the best way to improve lives, and these organizations very much want to improve lives. So they sometimes market as a child sponsorship, while actually focusing on community level projects. Sometimes they go the whole route, with photos and letters. Usually these are from kids who attend a school that has been improved. Rounding up that many cute kids is actually pretty hard, and it’s a huge distraction from the actual work. That’s why people like Heifer just use the disclaimers. I think I’ve heard that Heifer is actually having better results from larger projects- for example, a commercial rabbit farm that creates full time employment and greatly increases prosperity across the community.
NGOs have sophisticated marketing departments with modern lead management tools. If they are sending out big glossy catalogues, it’s because dollar for dollar that’s proven to be the best way to raise funding and achieve their goals. Even if it’s not your preference (I doubt it is theirs either), marketing is a reality for donation-based organizations. Chances are your contact information is in a big complex CRM tool that is carefully tuned to maximize results. This stuff is all tested, tracked, analyzed and refined. For example, organizations will send out different marketing materials to comparable lists and track what best the best response. They’ve found out that the number one best picture to raise donations is a picture of a girl holding a duck (true story), and you will almost never see men in these photos, as apparently nobody wants to give to men no matter how needy they may be. So while the glossies seem wasteful and counterintuitive, they are doing what is the best way to help the people they are trying to help.
Nobody “just gives out food”, unless it’s as part of immediate disaster relief. Now, we do provide food aid, but that is usually filtered through the commercial market, not handed out to individuals. The only time I can think of handing out food to individuals is school feedings, and that is basically creating an incentive for kids to go to school.
It wasn’t always this way, but almost any large organization today is going to have a fairly rigorous system for monitoring and evaluating their projects. It doesn’t work perfectly, but they do take a scientific approach to things. For example, if you build a well in one neighborhood, you are going to carefully monitor not just their waterborne disease load, but the waterborne disease loads of similar areas without the new well, so that you can run a study to determine if your well made a statistically significant difference. There are flaws- programs are rarely monitored for longer than a few years, everyone would rather be doing and funding the fun a rewarding project work and not writing and funding boring reports on a done deal, and there is a lot of pressure to tell a positive story to your donors. But learning does happen and programs are being designed according to what is well known to work.
Don’t forget to factor in that Charity Navigator is a fucking joke, as they have absolutely no way to determine how factual the numbers organizations report back are. Society’s insistence upon some arbitrarily low cost of fundraising is absurd, and equally impossible to police. Don’t fall for it, do your own research, support missions you believe in, and look at results - not accounting. Because if a group truly was cooking the books, I guarantee that they’d appear on Charity Navigator as a wonderful (on paper) organization.
Don’t they use the data the charities submit to the IRS? 
Yes. Do you really think they’re accurate? With constant public pressure to lower their overhead costs to ridiculous levels, there’s not a lot of hugely qualified CPAs out there doing the financials. And when there’s little to no oversight from the IRS on whether or not a non-profit’s Executive Director actually spent 50% of their time doing programming rather than administrating, rather than the likely 15% or so, why the hell wouldn’t they report it as 50%? And why wouldn’t an organization overreport the amount of space/equipment in their building dedicated to programming rather than administration - the case workers use that copier too!
Here’s a study done on 250,000 IRS Form 990s. If you make your charitable contributions based on an artificially created benchmark like “15% overhead, no more!”, you’re not going to like the results it shows.
A good read on foreign aid, especially the ‘adopt a child’ type is Road to Hell: Amazon.com