A charity that spends a sliver of its money on those it purports to serve
publicintegrity.org
publicintegrity.org
A charity that only moves money around should of course be pretty efficient about it. But a charity that actually does things faces the same kinds of inefficiencies as any business.
For instance, The Nature Conservancy is a charity I like (I'm not necessarily recommending them -- do your own research). About 2/3 of the raised funds go to their actual programs, and the rest is administrative and fundraising.
However, they are one of the few large environmental charities that actually does stuff to help the environment, and attracts the expertise to do it well. The rest are lobbyists and money-shufflers, which I have little patience for when it comes to charities.
In other words, I'm much more tolerant of inefficiency when actually doing something. I think anyone who actually does things would agree that it's not always efficient when observed from afar. But in reality it's much more efficient to go straight to the people who can do stuff than what other charities do: buy time with Congress, hoping that they will pass laws that will either (a) move some money around in such a way that someone (perhaps someone without much expertise) will do something; or (b) force someone to stop doing something, hoping that they won't find a much worse thing to do instead.
I lasted about 3 months and moved onto telephone sales for a major retailer. Back then if you had a deep voice you could make way better money than your friends working at fast food, etc.
I can recommend telephone cold calling as a means for getting an extremely harsh but powerful lesson in reading people via voice tone very very quickly. :)
I had 3 stints at telemarketing, my first was when I was 14 years old (summer job).
Except, you can probably pay an executive's salary AND buy more food and toiletries at wholesale rates with an equivalent cash donation.
https://www.npr.org/2011/11/22/142661882/a-case-for-cash-don...
There is obviously a need for money to buy in bulk the items that are needed. But if you can donate food that otherwise would go to waste and can be used locally as well, it's a win win.
Why is it always better? Cans are all downside compared to cash. They take up space, they deprecate, they may not be what the shelter needs.
Shelters accept food for 2 reasons. 1) Many people see giving food as more "moral" or better than money because they believe the recipient does not deserve anything more than food and getting dented cans of corn is better than nothing. 2) Some people get offended if the shelter will not accept your donation so in interests of keeping donors happy.
TLDR; shelters take ragu sauce and canned creamed corn b/c that's what they can get, but it's about catering to social norms not supporting the needy.
1) a law that mandates charities to display front and center the percentage of collected funds that went to charity in the previous year;
2) a hard cap on administration costs, maybe 1/3 of the collected funds.
If you’re running an animal shelter, who the hell is the money supposed to go to, the animals? Of course the money goes towards paying people to look after the animals. Money spent on those people’s salaries isn’t being “wasted” under any reasonable sense of the word.
I also think it might be good not to be too critical in general. As in, I don't care too much about overhead for most of my purchases, so if an organisation delivers a good amount of Good, then I'm not going to worry too much about whether it's the absolute most they can do. It's not like I donate that significant a part of my income anyway.
It's exactly the same for charity giving. (Perhaps more so for me, since my contributions cut into my living expenses in a noticeable way.)
Do other countries suffer similarly with fake self-serving charities like the US does?
By looking at their bank accounts.
> Do other countries suffer similarly with fake self-serving charities like the US does?
Not quite, robocalling is much less common, as are easy ways to figure out who is a likely donor.
A very good effort in this domain is Givewell, their own transparency report is a good example of how it should be done and their information is usually of very high quality:
See also: companies on eBay selling counterfeit stickers.
See also: the FOP designing stickers almost like vehicle tabs, with color coding so they can see that you're "paid up", sorry, "have donated".
Nothing screams I love my country like blatantly advertising corruption and using a tax exemption to do it.
Just the other day I met someone who was able to open a gun range in a town that I thought would never let someone do it, and he showed me his gold police union card or whatever and bragged about having the state's police union as a customer for his other business via whom he was able to contact an old police boss, and of course they were able to pull the right "levers" to get the permit for the business issued.
https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/other-non-profits/...
The more cops you know, the less inclined you are to get them involved in anything if you can help it. They aren't as bad as game wardens, but still best avoided if at all possible.
Be unemployed long enough and you had to do a work program, or learning scheme. I was laid off as a web developer during the first dot com crash. And ended up in one of these - a computer "web" course, run at a church, that'd teach people HTML, etc. One, I figured it'd be easy for me, and two, I could even mentor people.
It was a shit show. 10 people, 5 donated computers (which were old, and didn't have fresh installs, so lots of browser bar removals, etc., etc.). Only one copy of Dreamweaver. Lots of screwing around.
I'm thinking to myself, I know the government pays people to come up with these schemes and can make themselves a supplier - provide a program, outcomes, and get paid per student to teach them.
Why then the donated old computers, the church hall, and the shared copy of Dreamweaver? The second morning, the "tutor" told us the owners were going to come by and check on things.
It was two ladies in their 50s. They had near zero familiarity with computers and very little desire to know / learn anything...
... probably because they were too busy discussing the features of their two brand new company cars, Jaguars, that they'd just picked up. Not leased, just purchased outright. With the funds that were presumably to provide computers and educational materials.
Unemployment/retraining and social services type programs are child's play when it comes to state sanctioned wastes of money. The real money is in the programs judges force people to attend. The people who are really smart (or devious, depending on your viewpoint) make up programs that sound like they screwing people who deserve to be screwed (if you ask the people who take everything at face value) out of their money but are really a much broader dragnet. Traffic school and anything having to do with DUI are the best examples that come to mind but all sorts of "failure to respect the rules set by the government" civil infraction and misdemeanors have accompanying privately run programs that the judges will require people to attend in lieu of jail time or longer probation (both of which cost the state money). These programs can fly under the radar basically forever because a large chunk of the population will turn a blind eye to anything bad as long as you can do some mental gymnastics and make it seem like the bad thing is happening to "criminals".
In New York, they always have aggressive guys with heavy Long Island accents. The schtick always puzzled me, as I live upstate and the accent sounds like nails on a chalkboard up here.
For example, the Seattle Marathon has long claimed to help UW medicine, and then it turned out that less than 1% of their money (and none of the entry fees) were going there.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/just-1-of-seattle-...