I just finished reading “Charities paid $762M to private fundraisers” (A CBC News Investigates piece) and I have to say, I’m incredibly disappointed. Why?
1. Numbers, numbers, numbers. We’re talking about a small number of charities: 651 of 85,0000. That’s 0.008% – less than 1% – of the charities in Canada. We’re talking about a small amount of money: $762 million out of $8.2 billion. That’s 9.29% – less than 10% – of the money raised by charities.That’s not what comes across; instead, the reaction in the comments is “Well, I’ll never donate to charity again.” There’s a lot of great charities who are going to have an even harder time fundraising now.
2. “The beatings will continue until morale improves.” Those of us working in charities – both paid and unpaid (and yes, I do both) – put our hearts into this work. We get there early or stay late (or both). We work evenings, weekends and holidays. We spend our time advocating and educating about social change. Sensational reporting doesn’t help get the job done, it makes the job harder.
3. They completely missed the big question: Why are charities having to focus so much on donations? Could it be because governments are downloading service expectations onto charities and then cutting the funding? What about the role that private foundations play in helping wealthy donors avoid paying taxes, which leads to those funding cuts? What about grants that don’t allow for admin costs, which means the staff have to be paid from other sources, or grants that are only open to “new” projects? How did the change from program to project based funding impact these factors? All of these impact far more than the 0.008% of charities using professional fundraisers.
I’m not going to stop donating to charities (obviously). I do my research and know which ones do good work (and which don’t).. I wish the CBC had thought about the long-term impacts before doing such a hatchet job on the charitable sector in Canada, because the work is only going to get harder from here.