My grandmother saves the tops from soda cans, and then mails them to my cousin across the country, so that he can give them to charity. She must spend far more on postage than the soda tops are worth. What are other things you have seen people do for charity, where the charity would have done better if they gave them the money they spent on it?
A lot of that crap. I came in to say the tops from soda cans, but do they still clean off yogurt lids and send them in? Good lord, just donate.
The point of those programs is to get you to buy products, not help charity. So any time businesses play on people’s charitable natures to get them to buy things will likely be inefficient.
I worked for a major company that produced snack foods and you could collect points to send in and they would donate money to Boys and Girls Club. But the thing of it is they just donated $10,000 and threw away envelopes full of the points from the back of the bags. Whether they got 1 point or 1 million points mailed in didn’t matter, B&GC was getting the same 10k donation.
A whole lot of it. You might like this Cracked.com article “5 Popular Forms of Charity (That Aren’t Helping)”
They left out some big ones though. It is true when they say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. One of the best example of that is the feel-good tactic that volunteer groups and churches use - sending people with no real skills to ‘help’ people in the 3rd world by building something like basic infrastructure. There is even a paid travel industry built around this model. I am sure there are cases where this has worked out but it often doesn’t and people generally don’t want to insult their well-intended visitors by telling them so. The vast majority of teenagers, college students or office retirees do not know the first thing about laying a proper foundation, masonry, plumbing, electrical work or even basic carpentry. Those are all skills that take time and lots of training to learn. If you wouldn’t let a local youth group build an addition to your own garage, why do you think they are going to do any better just because you send them to a village in Honduras where the supplies are going to be even more limited?
The dirty little secret is that they often let the volunteers build something and then it either gets corrected every night by people with real skills or they just let them build the whole thing and then rebuild it after they leave because amateurs simply aren’t capable of building any substantial structure quickly even to 3rd World standards.
There is a solution for this problem that works much, much better but it doesn’t provide the same Instagram quality pictures or resume fodder so people just ignore the obvious. The much better solution is to take the money that would have been spent on plane tickets, sleeping bags and everything else and just send the money to hire qualified local people to build whatever is needed. It will be cheaper in the long-run and even that small infusion of cash into their economy will serve double-duty.
If you have more rare and in-demand skills, this doesn’t apply to you as long as you stick to your true area of expertise and it is truly needed locally but it applies to the vast majority of charitable projects that believe you can just send a mass of well intended Americans to any random part of the world and they can fix things right up in just a week or two.
Sponsoring run/walk events. While those events do make money for the charity they can have pretty high overhead associated with the event itself. Just donating straight to a charity that effectively uses the money for the cause at hand is far more efficient. The reason they are so popular amongst charities is the runner/walkers become unpaid fund raisers. People who wouldn’t otherwise donate get socially pressured into doing it.
Someone proudly tells me his son is growing a mustache for Movember. Ah yes, slacktivism.
Yeah, and running/walking doesn’t raise money in any direct, non-artificial way. Why should I donate $X in exchange for you walking 5 miles? Your walking doesn’t benefit me—or anybody else, for that matter.
And how about selling stuff for charity—candy, Girl Scout cookies, etc. Wouldn’t it be easier if I just take the money I would have spent on the stuff and give it directly to your organization? And then, if I really want some cookies, I can buy some the next time I’m at the store.
A lot of charity fundraising may make sense from a psychological standpoint, but from a coldly logical, economical standpoint, it’s very inefficient.
Heh - first on the list ‘awareness’. I’m approached by someone awaring 
me about dyslexia. I’m slightly dyslexic with numbers, I’ve got some tips and tricks but no, she backs away. Seems they’re not looking for input, they’re not going to DO anything and she **still **tries to get me to take the leaflet.
Hit songs for charity.
This is something I am okay with. I go to a lot of anime conventions and most of them have a charity auction. Fans get rare/signed merchandise, and some charity (the cons I go to usually give to someone in their area) ends up with a lot of money.
But that’s exactly why they do work: you probably wouldn’t have given if someone you know hadn’t asked, and most especially, the person might not feel comfortable just asking for a donation.
The charity walk/bake sale/etc. is a social lubricant that makes it easier for the people doing the requesting.
In the same with “go to Africa and build a church/school” trips. I’ve known some that send professional contractors to supervise the team … but even there, it still would be more efficient to send the contractor and have him supervise paid locals. But people are much more likely to give to send their nephew to Africa to build a school then they are to give to send some guy they’ve never met, and the nephew wouldn’t likely be doing the asking if he wasn’t going himself.
Yeah - A local gaming con has a charity auction where people donate items, and they sell for outrageous amounts as an excuse to donate. In fact, the same notorious white elephant has been donated and sold every year for 20 years. Always a crowd-pleaser, and it sort of goes round-robin among a bunch of dudes who want to donate anyway. As long as everyone is aware of what is going on, and it’s fun, what’s the harm?
Sending clothes to poor countries has to be at the top though - not only are the clothes invariable unsuitable, it wrecks the local economy. If you must knit for charity, knit preemie hats for your local hospital or something. No need to bother Africa because you need to feel better.
Our department at work (~50 people) went to a food bank to put bulk pasta into 2lb bags. The four hour shift involved at least 2.5 hours of paperwork, instruction and photography.
Later I found out that the big check we handed over at the photo op was the price of them allowing us to “help” with the work. And that the bulk bins of pasta exist purely for this purpose.
What makes you think that there is no professional, skilled labor involved? Do you think that youth groups literally show up and build buildings from the bottom up? I can’t believe this would be the practice.
I volunteered to work on the new wing of my own church here in the US. There was a GC and then some tradespeople and some folks who had real-world building skills, then a whole group of people like me who had a strong back and brought my own gloves. Even my mom was able to do work like sweeping up and hauling trash. Heck we had like 6 people there volunteering just to get us fed.
Do you really think that Jenny from 10th grade is the one in charge of hanging a door on a new house in Honduras? A lot of work can get done if you have a lot of willing hands. And if you can’t get the power tools there to do a lot of the work, a lot of willing hands would be helpful.
Do you mean to tell me that I did not cure cancer by not shaving during the month of November?!?!?
I worked so hard at not doing anything for a good cause. And now my efforts are wasted. Maybe I could shave off my scraggly beard and donate it to charity.
There are probably many young men out there who don’t have access to a salt and pepper bit of sawdust.
Do candlelight vigils really accomplish anything?
Yes, for the people who make and sell the candles.
Locks of Love is another organization that isn’t what most people think it is.
They’re just a shill for Big Wax.
A candlelight vigil is a demonstration. The point of demonstrations to to send a message, to involved parties, the public, powers that be. Vigils are suited for certain kinds of quiet messages.
Do tell.