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.