Parachuting for Charity: A 5-year audit (1999)
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
These were a minuscule success, and I later thought that a “fun run” would be a good way to raise some money. I asked around about how to organize such things, and I was connected to a firm that organized these things as a service.
They took me to a nice lunch, which I thought was a bad sign. “Never buy anything in a room with a chandelier,” is the old saying, and while there was no chandelier in the restaurant, the metaphor was nevertheless on point.
When I finally got the actual details of how the run would operate, I realized that the firm’s fees would greatly exceed the amount of money that would end up going to the charity.
I speculate that the “market” for these services are people who want to buy some respectability. Had I gone though with the deal and the run was a success, everyone would think I was a nice person doing nice things for people in need, even if the actual numbers would show that I was a nice person doing nice things for a service company’s revenues.
N=1, of course, but I have had an extremely cynical view of charity events ever since. There appears to be an entire industry built around siphoning away 90%-99% of every dollar adjacent to charity.
———
* Bridge the card game, not the BASE-jumping location.
In the end the charity still gets more money than they had before and the runners get some exercise: win / win. Plus you've raised awareness of the cause and some participants will go on the become regular donors.
Is it though? Not everyone who participates does it to support a charity. Some people just want to do the event.
Obviously it's more efficient to simply not hold the event and have all the resources that would be spend on running an event simply go to the charity ... but that's not the point. You're doing the event, because you want the event.
It's a bit like saying that people play the lottery and think it is an effective way to support education in their state. No they don't. They know most of the money doesn't support education, but even if a small amount does, the other benefit (playing the lottery or running a 5k) is still worth something to them.
So who pays the bill for the firm's fees? Might be okay if it's a "sponsored by megacorp" kind of thing, but if it's just a civic-minded individual who's actually trying to run a real fundraiser?
This is on top of the fact that the charity again takes a huge admin cut, and I'm willing to bet that the kind that organizes marathons with pink ribbons are the same that have 95% expense ratios.
If you go to Panda Express the person asks if you want to donate a few dimes for charity. I bet they contribute more to charity than these pretentious events. You don't call it a charity lunch do you?
Do these events if you want but be honest and call it for what they are which is just circular congratulatory social Sunday pasttimes for people with too much money (and ps someone somewhere might get a buck or two, maybe).
This reminds me of when people complain about charities paying their CEO well.
Would you rather pay a CEO $100k to bring in $1million in charity funds, or pay a CEO $1million to bring in $5million in charity funds?
Same here. Would you rather run a successful event that brings in $5k in charity funds, or an event run by amateurs who end up bringing in $1k in charity funds?
There's an argument to be made about transparency, and organizations that take all this too far (90+% is clearly too much), but end results matter.
How are they going to raise the money, does the one raising $5M blindly do so by enlisting a third party to pay poverty wages to young people to con pensioners out of their money (usual way is to trick them in to signing a monthly payment when they think they're paying a one-off [to get rid of the annoying person invading their home]) on the doorstep?
Do CEOs only act competently for immoral sums of money?
How about the CEO does an honest days work, raises what they can without defrauding people and gets paid at most, say, 3 times the median salary of everyone employed by the organisation?
There's a good chance that even if the CEO is honest and completely above board all they're doing is stopping other charities getting money. That is, splitting the pot differently. So, perhaps the $100k is far better - was overall the charity sector gets more to spend on charitable aims.
I can't say anything about your fraud or conning comments. Obviously that's bad, and I worry that you're arguing in bad faith by bringing that up.
My main point is that being the leader of a large organization that brings in lots of money is a skill that is highly sought after. If you want to attract that kind of person then you'll have to pay for it, or find the 1 in [some large number of people] that has both the skills needed and the willingness to work for much lower than the rest of the market would pay them.
My wife worked for a non-profit theater (12 million/year budget, 4 million from donations, 8 million from ticket sales. Most of the donations are from major donors - 5K and more.) Its 'CEO' was the best-paid person in the theater, paid ~230k/year. The stagehands, who were making ~$25/hour would grouse non-stop about how much he was paid. From what I know of him, and his job, (mostly fundraising), I am almost positive that he was a profit center for the theater. If he left three months from now, their financials would not improve.
Now, it's entirely possible that someone else in his position, who would take the job for $130,000/year, and would raise as much, or more money. Or maybe someone else would raise even more money, and expect $500,000/year.
I think that for that particular theater, they'd probably be wrong to fire their CEO, if their goal was to cut costs.
Personally I'd rather pay five CEOs $100k each to bring in $5million, than one CEO double that for the same net effect.
There is only so much money people will give to charity in a given year. It's entirely possible that the larger charities with higher expense ratios starve out smaller charities that are more efficient at spending the money the receive, so the net effect is worse.
Y'all are bringing up a ton of hypotheticals that don't matter to my main point: Talent costs money. The optimal end result may end up spending a lot of money on that talent to bring in the most amount of money.
This includes hiring an agency to run a fun run (the original scenario) when having it be run by amateurs might end up with it failing for a million reasons (low turnout, insufficient staffing, etc).
And yet that argument is never made to justify paying line-workers more. Non-profits often pay regular workers less than public sector or private sector jobs because "the mission is the reward". Shouldn't the same apply to non-profit leadership?
This isn't an argument to "justify paying the leadership more". That's backwards. This is an argument to say that when you're a board member trying to fill a leadership role, it might be worth it to spend a good amount of money to bring in people who would otherwise never take the role.
If you want a line-worker argument, it's similar to when people start trying to outsource software work to cheap firms and are then surprised when the results aren't satisfactory. Bring in line workers (software workers in this case) who cost more but are better and you might have better end results.
You shouldn't just pay the outsourcing firm more money and expect better results. In the same way you shouldn't "justify paying the leadership more", you should find leadership who are worth more money.
In both cases, it's possible you find the holy grail of someone wiling to work for the cause for little money and are also talented, but it's much more difficult.
I never said "little money". Leadership roles signify high status, so you have to pay an upper-middle-class or upper class salary for the area.
But is it not fair to assume that nearly everyone who cares more about the money and is talented enough to take a leadership role, has already gone to the private sector? A desirable CEO candidate determined to stay in the non-profit world is far more likely to look at whether the org excites them, than how much it's paying (again, as long as it's an upper-middle to upper class salary).
For line workers it really may just be a paycheck.
If Robin Mahfood can justify his 400k CEO paycheck for "Food for Poor" (real name and number) and also promise that all the new money he brought in was actually money that would have been squandered otherwise, then Robin Mahfood is indeed a worthwhile expenditure. I doubt that's the case most of the time, though.
Nevertheless, these might not be comparable scenarios anyways - an expensive CEO might atleast make financial sense if not a moral one. It's just a stretch to say a very low margin charity event is even a financially viable event, and hopefully your million dollar CeO can see that and avoid it for his charity.
No, “money going to charities” is not all one bucket. A huge chunk of charities are incompetent or are just stupid ideas to begin with. It’s better for 70% of my donation to go to a competent charity than 90% to a pointless one, even if that 20% difference is going to the CEO.
Checkout givewell.org to learn about the importance of picking good charities. It is critical to poach charity money from bad charities.
In most realistic scenarios I would pay attention to efficiency first.
These requests burn me up. The cashier at Super Store asks "would you like to donate $5 to charity?" What charity? It's nutrition focused for school kids; what kind of monster wants little kids to go hungry?
Then you find out it's the Weston (controlling family) charitable organization, they use the money to buy food through their own organization and benefit from the tax credits... no thanks.
My process:
1. Sit down with your family and decide what causes you'd like to support,
2. Do some research to identify organizations that are cost-effective with their money,
3. Make a commitment on an annual or reoccurring basis,
4. Be the dick who says "no" to every other casual request at your front door, stores, etc.
I have a personal set of charities that I donate to regularly.
Then, as a family, we discuss, and we have a couple regular charities, and then a few charities for causes that are important to us that year (e.g. this year it's voting rights), and we research and find the best charities (not necessarily the biggest) and donate a much more significant amount.
We discuss this every year, and bring up the past year's giving.
This is something new for us -- discussing money and charity like this. As kids, we had no idea my parents donated to anything. My own kids are too little at the moment, but soon enough they can join too.
I don't donate anything else (except for my local homeless news carriers), and feel no guilt at all for not accepting the supermarket's scammy charity of anything else.
Buy a turkey (at retail, from them, full price, no discount) and then immediately donate that turkey to Second Harvest. They give nothing, but take the markup on the bird. How charitable.
What a scam. I gave the local food bank $35 cash instead which has way more buying power to get food for people in my area in need.
Second, often this “awareness” is completely absent, even among volunteers. I ran a race once where the primary charity was lung cancer research, and volunteers along the course were smoking.
[1]: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/just-1-of-seattle-...
What exactly is the issue with volunteers smoking? Is it that they might physically or emotionally trigger someone?
Is it a fear of second hand smoke related illness? Do they find the irony upsetting? Something else
Yes, cigarettes cause lung cancer. Does that mean smokers should be disqualified for volunteering at a lung cancer charity? They probably have more of a vested interest in the charity than the general population.
None of your straw men make any sense. Nobody is asking for smokers to be disqualified, just for them to control themselves for a few moments and not smoke at a lung cancer charity event.
You calling somebody else "triggered" is ironic too: Why are you feigning moral outrage about somebody else being "triggered", which in their case is totally justified and absolutely harmless, more than you're honestly outraged at somebody else not just ironically but hypocritically smoking a cigarette at a lung cancer charity event, which is physically dangerous to them and other people, reeks to high hell, and is totally ignorant, clueless, disrespectful, and rude, flaunting the whole point of the event? They're practically blowing smoke in other people's faces. Yet that doesn't offend you, while other people being offended by it does.
Get some perspective and stop pretending to be so triggered and outraged yourself. Being "triggered" at somebody smoking in a totally inappropriate situation like that is not worse or even close to a smoker making a mockery of a lung cancer charity event by flagrantly giving themselves and other people lung cancer at the event. And you getting so triggered yourself that you disparagingly call somebody else triggered isn't a very convincing argument. It's the textbook definition of projection.
And "honestly": pursuing people with persistent requests for evidence or repeated questions, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity pretending to be concerned, is called "sealioning".
>What exactly is the issue with volunteers smoking? Is it that they might physically or emotionally trigger someone?
Triggered isn't exclusively a slur, but a real phenomenon, though often misused.
Smoke triggering a physical reaction in a post-op cancer survivor may be a legitimate concern, as would be triggering a emotional response in people who lost a loved one.
It was not and is not clear from Ken's post that this was his rationale, and rather some relation between smoking and cause "awareness". I have lost family members to lung cancer, and have other family members who still smoke. I have seen people smoke as they die of lung cancer. I do not think it is for lack of "awareness".
Also, it seems like you have a very different mental image of what was described, and a very different reaction to it. Seeing someone self harm at such and event would make me sad, not angry. They are literally the class of people the event is trying to support.
So "they" should be thankful for any old crumbs left on the table after their betters are done patting themselves on the back?
Honestly, I prefer the Randian take on charity to this. At least that one has the virtue of not obfuscating.
Notwithstanding effective altruists.
That aside, when I spent more time doing running & triathlon there was an unspoken rule that people don't ask the group for charitable funding for these things.
A large number of charity marathon runners will be effectively buying a place in a race they did not good-for-age qualify for. There's nothing wrong with that and cool that a proportion of the ticket price goes to charity, but it would be great if more people could just own it.
The general rule is don't ask other people to pay for your fun adventure activities.
I wish more charities would constrain themselves to their original narrow mandate without success inevitably growing their "addressable market"...
Looks like they're using half their revenues to build up a bank account. To smooth out their net purchases? For the most part, I like their model. They turn thousands of small donations directly into nets without a bunch of middle men.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/what-is-failson-culture-look-n...
Sure there are examples of egregious shadiness in nonprofits, but an above comment mentioned the Red Cross basically putting 375m/500m of donations toward the programs. Honestly, if they send every dollar received straight the beneficiaries, they would have raised significantly less than 500m. Would it be better for the programs to receive 375m/500m or 25m/25m? Sure we don't know how much they would have raised without all the fundraising, but this issue is more nuanced than people think.
EDIT: I read the Red Cross article from NPR, and it appears that example falls under legitimate questioning of the use of funds. My larger point still applies in general though.
That kind of blue my mind. I always wondered whether the money donated by companies would have been better used to just hire contractors.
The majority of HFH houses are actually built by contractors without any volunteers messing shit up.
But wait, you might ask, what about the charity? Toys for Tots. Bring your own damned toy, because the organizers sure as hell weren't giving the little shits any toys. None of the money was earmarked for the charity, right into the event organizers' pockets it goes.
That's the most egregious example. Other examples abound to solidify my belief that charity fun runs are a racket. Write a check directly, and go find a run that isn't trying to bullshit you with a coat of "it's for charity".
> with awards, traffic control, support, timing and placing for $35
Surly those must struggle to break even? Wouldn't a higher fee, and, more importantly, nearly-zero costs be exactly what you want for a charity run?
The one for 35$ wasn't the charity run, that was the commercial one. The charity one was 85$, thus even if they just paid the commercial one 35$ per runner, they would still comes out with 50$ per runner given, yet if his story is true, they gave 0$ per runner.
Apparently they're sponsored, but I have no idea who sponsored this one.
I never understood why people would volunteer for an event like that. You aren’t supporting anything except the company that is profiting from the run.
The volunteers are to reduce other costs for what is probably at best a break-even proposition. Race directors generally aren’t rolling in cash, either. That is, unless one doesn’t provide any of those services and charges $85.
Edit: It seems to me that it’s an amazingly potent form of evil to poison the well of charity so that there’s no air/light/goodwill left for those who would legitimately try to help the unfortunate.
What makes it a “room with a chandelier” is when it is artifice, designed to impress those who mistake flash for function. And here is the kicker: They are trying to close the business while the “mark” is overwhelmed by the spectacle.
It’s a judgment call, in my opinion. If Tim Cook flew me to California and took me to his favourite place to talk about working at Apple, I wouldn't think he was trying to con me with opulence.
But of he just happened to have an employment agreement in his pocket, and would I care to sign it over the cigars and brandy... That would be buying something in a room with a chandelier.
Likewise, if a block-chain startup took its angel money and bought themselves a party at CES with an open bar... I’d look askance at my “VIP Invite.”
But if, during the party, all they said was, “Hey, keep us in mind if you or someone you know is looking...” well, that’s buying exposure, and maybe I’m not impressed, but they aren’t trying to sway me at the moment I’m making a decision, so it wouldn’t be buying something in a room with a chandelier.
100% bias in my characterization, as you can tell.
To be fair, they are doing more than a simple package holiday offers, but it is still not a cheap expedition.
Kubernetes appears to be built around siphoning away 90%-99% of my CPU when I tried to use it to manage a 100 item todo list on my Chromebook.
N=1 of course.
I found it:
One thing I've learned from many so-called "philanthropists" is that hosting charity events can be a great status and money making/saving opportunity for those in the business of it. If you've ever watched a "real housewive of ..." episode, those wacky ladies are constantly hosting charity events and provide a pretty good example of how this works:
Full comment here:
[0] https://www.npr.org/2016/06/16/482020436/senators-report-fin...
Per the article, “All charity parachuting in our study was apparently done by static line methods from 2500± 3000 feet.” [1] Static line parachuting means the participant jumps solo and a cord automatically opens the parachute for them when they exit the plane. It’s very different than skydiving tandem, which is far more common these days and much safer.
That still doesn’t mean that skydiving for charity makes any sense financially. It strikes me as absurd that people who want to skydive collect money from friends under the expectation that a small percentage of the donated funds make their way to a charity —- £30 per jump for the NHS, though apparently more for other organizations. [2]
But then this comes from a country that is trying to convince the rest of the world that wearing a clown nose for a day is a charitable act. [3]
Y’all can’t just give for the sake of giving? ;-)
[1] https://www.gwern.net/docs/sociology/1999-lee.pdf
[2] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3224643/Why-tell-ch...
1. Do something cool they always wanted to
2. Get someone else to pay for it
3. Get some feel-good story to tell their friends in the process
Perhaps it’s not the case, and that most people are well intentioned, don’t think about it this way and aren’t trying to do anything nefarious. But it’s hard to shake the idea once it’s in your head :-/
I did sponsor him but I kept thinking it would have been better to send 100% of my donation directly to the charity in my uncle's name. Of course that would have been a lot less fun for my uncle.
People have come to the sober realization that the only way public schools get sufficient funding in the US (and to a lesser extent in the UK) is from private donations. The system has now baked this in as an assumption, even building local real estate markets around the shared consensus to privately financially support neighborhood schools.
The marathon’s cut is a marketing expense. It may be better to get one slice of a bigger pie than all of a tiny/non-existent dessert.
I'm not asking to be combative - it's a legitimate question millions have to ask themselves. My friends and I participated in the ice-bucket challenge. We would not have done what we did w/o such a ridiculous, yet fun, method of virality.
To me, it is about 'effective' money. With your uncle + the organization, was the money more effective with or without?
There is an interesting TED talk from 2013 that highlights a semi-counterintuitive problem - if you can't pay top dollar, you can't get top dollar talent except in extremely narrow cases[0].
My interpretation is, we would love 100% of our charitable donations to reach the village who needs water or a toilet, but the reality is, people who run the org need to get paid as well.
Measuring a charity by how stingy it is might actually be less effective overall.
Anecdote: Bill and Melinda Gates foundation absolutely pays top dollar (of charities) to gain some of the smartest former execs in the industry. They're wildly effective.
[0] https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_abou...
I guess another question is whether my uncle would have made that effort without the marathon.
As long as the person raising the money does 'something they always wanted to' under their own dime and raises money, I can't see anything wrong with it. Obviously, this article highlights there's a fundamental but obscure flaw with this specific method.
That’s the problem. The sponsors think they are giving a donation to the charity, whereas the charity actually only gets what’s left over after the expensive fun has been had.
When I have done sponsored things I have always covered the costs myself and handed all the sponsors money over.
I wonder if they actually have enough data for the claims in the abstract. 30 pounds seems abysmally low even by '99 standards.
https://www.ucd.ie/t4cms/UCD%20School%20of%20Medicine%20Rosa...
Edit: I should say I did this as an A-license holder
That's how-are-they-even-allowed-to-operate high. Can this really be right?
So I'm sure their overall injury rates are lower
I personally would love to go skydiving but I wouldn't get sponsored for it because it isn't actually hard. Unlike running a marathon for instance, it doesn't require any preparation on my part or any superhuman effort, just a lot of cash.
I think most people who do feats of endurance for charity (marathons, cycling, mountaineering, etc) would probably like to do it anyway but it's fair to ask for sponsorship money because of the effort involved.
An entirely orthogonal question is how event costs are funded: do participants pay out of their own pocket or is it taken from the donations pool? If it's the latter I'd call it borderline charity fraud, no matter if the activity is running, flaggelation, parachuting or smoking weed.
The usual compromise, I think, is clear separation between sponsors (who fund the event) and donors (whose money is given to charity with zero cut or expenses deduction). It's hard to find something to criticize in that model, if someone wants to sponsor entertainment, fine. If tens of thousands of sponsorship dollars yield tens of donation dollars, still fine: the assumption that the tens of thousands would have been donated otherwise cannot be made.
(it still might get muddy if that sponsorship somehow gets different tax treatment than other business expenses or if the main beneficiary of those costs, either as participant or as organizer, is the CEO or something like that but that's totally besides the question of parachuting vs endurance)
You don't have to buy a parachute! Or an airplane, for that matter.
>Sixty-three percent of casualties who were charity-parachutists required hospital admission, representing a serious injury rate of 7%
Can any skydivers give insight on this?
These days most people do tandems, and if you follow instructions and raise your legs upon landing, you won't get hurt.
You can find the USPA incidents here: https://uspa.org/Find/FAQs/Safety
The square canopy (or the ram-air canopy) can indeed be slowed down. It's also a lot more manoeuvrable, and can go quite fast. A novice might not be able to correctly judge the speed/altitude/wind direction - and if not handled properly, a square canopy can land you on your face or break a leg.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parachute_landing_fall
EDIT: spelling and added a link
> The number of regular jumps by experienced enthusiasts done during this period is estimated at 50,000, giving an incidence of injury for regular parachutists of 0.02% – reflecting better expertise and training
In the late 90s, wouldn't they have been using the ones that you can fly like a wing? And I don't know how widespread it was, but possibly a radio to give you instructions, when to flare.
However, almost everyone else on my course was - they were really young as well, a bit naive and maybe a little dazed by the idea of jumping out of a plane. Some of them were Chinese/Korean students, with a very, very rudimentary grasp of the English language; I genuinely have no idea how they all passed the course, but they did. When they went on to jump, I think just under half of them ended up with broken legs/sprained ankles and so on. If my memory serves me right during the same drop the jumpmaster managed to kill himself too.
To sum up, 11% sounds about right.
Just how drunk were you? Mushrooms are way more rewarding anyways.
The instructor's name was Andrew Kelly, and the time was May 1998 [1] - quite a long time ago, so forgive my foggy memory. I wasn't on that particular load; I had already done my first jump a few days before...and my second jump 3 days after he passed.
[1] - http://www.skydivingfatalities.info/search.asp?MinDate=5%2F8...
It seems like instead of having a hundred thousand micro-charities, it would be better if the money were just sent directly to a large charity that already operates at scale and can use the money more efficiently.
Sending $100 to Doctors Without Borders is far more effective than giving $100 to The Dr. Steffy McStethoscope Memorial Fund For People Who Want To Make Themselves Feel Good.
It's like "raising awareness." It doesn't help anyone but the people trying to make themselves feel better about themselves.
We could call it "taxes".
(assuming that the costs are not outright taken from the donations pool, then the reason is still money, but in a much more self-serving way bordering on fraud)
https://web.archive.org/web/20070624105650/http://www.africo...
The question, I suppose, is whether it's better for charity that it collects a few dollars that it might have not received anyway.
The example in the OP is particularly egregious because it suggests that society is paying a high cost for a few dollars donated to charity.
Used to work for an NHS hospital trust.
The chief executive made a rather rash, very public announcement (under peer pressure) that he was going to do a skydive for the hospital charity.
Lots of jokes etc.
But he was going to do it.
Until our chief medical director took him aside and told him about the injury rate and how they actually cost the NHS more.
Though a few people from the charity brought it up, it was politely forgotten about. And he did a walk around the peak district instead
A bit of a (related) tangent...
As a parent this is really obvious for almost all events that schools run. Of course, an argument in those cases is that they have educational value, but I think that teaching to do the maths and to be effective beyond the immediate desire to "help and do something" also has educational value.
Sometimes we, parents, have to spend £20 to get the child ready for the event where they are asked to donate £1 for the chosen charity...
Yada yada yada, he broke both his legs. Something tells me it didn't help much.
So a known issue and one perpetuated still today for profit. But this is a pattern we see play out over and over again and alas without some media drama incident of say a charity parachutist landing on a child in a playground with fatalities - nothing will change. Heck - look at bigger issues like climate change and how long that's been known about and how long it drags out.
Which makes you wonder why governments who have departments for everything, lack one for common sense education as many sound messages get lost in the void of nothingness.
A bit of web searching took me here:
https://thedevilcorp.wordpress.com/
It's very enlightening and alarming!
And if so, is it possible the existence of the NHS – making participants & charities somewhat more indifferent to the medical costs – is what's helping the popularity (& resource waste) here, in a classic 'moral hazard' situation?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard
Have UK charities just figured out a way, via a slight nudge to wannabe parachuters, to siphon off some of the value of NHS coverage into their own program funds?
* at what cost
* compared to what
* with what hard evidence
How can 174 people place significant burden on NHS? I understand their concern but certainly there are bigger fish to fry.
Also, more importantly, the analysis is completely flawed. Their ROI is based on the injuried, not all who donated and dived.
There analysis is correct. They looked across all charity parachutists, the medical costs for those injured versus total amount raised.
How can it put a burden on the NHS?
Of 105 patients admitted to hospital, 66 (63%) required operative intervention.
Can you imagine the 1 or 2 hospitals dealing with this? The system overall can deal with it, but not the local providers.
There were ~1500 jumpers in 5 years across the two centres, of which 174 (11%) were injured at a cost of £3751 per injury.
Too many loose ends here, or a sloppy job at communication.