What kind of charities are worth your donations?
Brand Names, Hollywood, Industry, Services, charities, fundraising
There are thousands of charities and they all want your money.
Everything from fighting cancer to helping the homeless, the list is endless and with only so much of your hard earned dollars to go around how do you decide which is the most worthy?
Interestingly enough that many charitable organizations are trying to cure or combat the same thing. Just think of how many foundations or causes have asked you to fight breast cancer or colon cancer or skin cancer? For every one kind of disease or cause; there are a dozen of so organizations that are all raising money to find a cure.
This scenario begs to ask the question; why do we need all these organizations to ask for our money separately? Why can’t they work together under one name so that all the funds are put into one pile and focused on reaching the goal everyone is striving for? It is not a question of who cares the most or even who may be the most efficient at raising funds or who has the most effective methods of distribution, but what is comes down to many times is one basic human emotion.
Pride.
Many charities and foundations, although created for a good cause, are established out of ego. That is not to say that a person who has been profoundly effected in one way or another by some catastrophic trauma shouldn’t feel compelled to do something to help. However with so many organizations all working for the same goal, what is the purpose of splitting the work force and slicing up the limited funds with the small resources available?
Some charities such as the United Way, for example have tried to be an umbrella and a catch all for a multitude of causes. But often when an organization takes on too much they need to increase the staff to support the work load and thus bureaucracies are born which actually take away much of the money raised for the cause. Percentages that a lot of charities get as the override for administrating the projects eat away too much of the donation.
At that point fewer donations go to the actual thing they are fighting thus preventing enough forward motion to reaching the goal and finding a solution. It also brings up the argument that this is precisely the reason why cures or solutions are not met. If a resolution were reached the charity would be “out of business”.
In 1994 a woman named Tess Cacciatore started a 501ce, not-for-profit organization designed as a model of collaboration between already existing charities. Ms. Cacciatore’s hope was to bring together these entities as a way to work together and achieve the goal common to them all.
Unfortunately she found that most of the “named” charities operated in an atmosphere of competition rather than cooperation.This hypocrisy reflected the true nature of charitable organizations as ego driven endeavors that didn’t like the idea of sharing the spotlight and donations.
Undaunted she founded The World Trust Foundation which has broken the paradigm of charitable causes by stream lining the administration overhead and creating smaller, results driven programs designed to tackle causes that can actually be resolved and perpetuate continuous benefits long after the initial program or event has ended.
Projects such as building 37 new homes for Tsunami victims in Sri Lanka in less time than it took the Red Cross to unpack their bags, or developing a virtual fundraising campaign that brought in enough money within 60 days, to feed 1.3 million children in the United States, the money distributed to three already well established charities; Feed the Children, Huston Food Bank and Children’s Hunger Fund of Los Angeles.
“We didn’t want to recreate the wheel.” said Ms. Cacciatore as way of explaining why The World Trust Foundation has structured their organization to take advantage of those entities that already have the channels in place to help those in need instead of recreating a bureaucracy within her own charity that would just take money away from the cause to pay for staff that would, in essence, do the same thing these other charities are already set up to do.
“The idea is to share the results and not worry about who gets credit” she says.
This approach was not very popular 20 years ago but is starting to gather momentum as other charities and organizations come to the realization that its more about solving the problem than getting the credit for doing so. Even still the concept has yet to be embraced by the majority.
For this reason when looking for a place to “invest” your donation, look into how well the charity utilizes the funds. How much of each donation actually goes to the cause and how much is used to support the organization itself.
Another aspect the World Trust Foundation has pioneered for the non-profit arena is the rethinking of how to raise funds.By looking at ways to create revenue streams through social entrepreneur enterprises, Ms. Cacciatore believes that charities can developed products that brand the cause and generate money. This type of approach has met with some resistance since many charities consider products for profit a soiled concept.
However since all the money generated by the selling of these types of products go back to funding the charity it’s not truly profit but a venue for funds that doesn’t rely on telethon, donation boxes and such. Another consideration in shifting the perspective away from charities acting as beggars, is to treat the organizations as businesses.
Structuring these charities in the same fashion of a successful business model would only help cut down waste and may actually speed up the process in which a cure or solution to the many problems we face is found.
Torchon @ September 11, 2008