Scribblings No.23
Hello!
I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of Ivy Benson and her All Girls Band before:
This week I ponder how we should fund the things we care about and I’ve read A Lot of good articles - including an FT piece that adds some slightly concerning context to the potential for flexible remote working that I wrote about last week.
Happy Friday!
Give us a bob!
I recently noticed an advert that keeps coming up on my Instagram feed, inviting me to enter a prize draw to win a £3 million townhouse and raise money for the British Heart Foundation in the process. It’s now been joined by another advert inviting me to enter a prize draw to win a Cotswold country cottage while raising money for The Prince’s Trust. Both these prize draws are actually organised by a third party organisation, a for-profit American fundraising firm called Omaze (and since I googled them, I’m now getting the Omaze branded adverts as well).
I used to work in the charity sector, I know how incredibly hard fundraising is (and I strongly suspect I would be no good at it). And what was already a tough gig has been made much harder by the pandemic, particularly for the British Heart Foundation who have the most shops of any charity in the UK. Yet this particular fundraising event makes me uncomfortable. There’s something that feels off-kilter about tempting people to make a donation to your charity by focusing on the (very small chance) of winning a luxury benefit rather than any sense of the potential good their donation may do.
Omaze are very bullish about their fundraising, arguing that they are taking the traditional, exclusive black-tie charity auctions, and opening them up to everyone, increasing the money raised for the charities involved and giving more people a chance of winning. On their US website they break down how a typical $10 contribution to enter a ‘prize-based experience’ such as the townhouse prize draws would work: $1.50 to the charity, $1.50 to Omaze, $7 to cover the cost of sourcing the prize, marketing it and processing payments - so only 15% of the entry fee actually ends up with the charity. They argue that because they raise a larger amount of money overall the fact that a smaller percentage goes to the charity is not a problem - it is more money than the charity would otherwise raise. But how many people who enter the prize draw realise how little of their donation will be contributed to the good cause that made them think oh go on then, its for charity?
The British Heart Foundation have an FAQ on the prize draw on their website where they state they will receive 80% of the net proceeds (which using Omaze’s breakdown above that would mean receiving around $2.40 per $10 as opposed to $1.50 - better but still not great). But the FAQ makes clear the attraction of this partnership to them. There are no costs and risks for them in the running of the prize draw and Omaze have guaranteed that they will receive at least £100,000 - they hope that it will raise them closer to £500,000. As a charity it must feel like a no-brainer, much needed money with which they can do good with no actual outlay apart from the use of their brand.
Writing this is making me feel weird. I’m worried that I will seem like a kill joy or totally naive. I hope I’m not either. But one of the challenges for charities, is that they are essentially moral organisations, set up to carry out specific charitable purposes. In other words, they are set up to do good. And because of that, we do hold them to a higher standard. We don’t just expect them to do good deeds, we expect them to behave at all times in an ethical way and some of the most shocking news stories in recent years have been when charities fall short of those standards.
I had a friend at university who found it impossible to say no to charity fundraisers on the high street, which would have been fine if it was coins in a collection box but it was sign-ups to direct debits, resulting in multiple charities taking ten or twenty pounds out of her account each month which she couldn’t really afford. It had never occurred to me that you would stop to talk to a charity fundraiser on the street (I really am seeming humourless this week) but after that I started to watch them in action. And it was noticeable, uncomfortably obvious, how often they would let multiple people walk by to focus their attention on young, single women by themselves who were obviously thought to be the easier target. Efficient but ethically queasy.
I read an article recently by a former colleague, Bertie Bosrendon, who noted that in the past:
I worked for organisations which initially refused to take part in a charity lottery because gambling was addictive, and against their core values. And others where staff vetoed the charity of the year fundraising of a company linked to the arms industry.
He suggests that this strong sense of ethics has changed. I’m not surprised. Post the financial crash in 2007, fundraising for charities became increasingly competitive, and in the years of austerity since 2010, the need that many charities serve has only grown.
Are these the type of actions that big charities have to take now to remain visible and financially viable in a busy, competitive world? Charities have to fundraise, and maybe I am just advocating for a standard of ethical purity that is unattainable and would probably be self-defeating. But in fundraising I don’t think charities big or small should take advantage of people’s good nature or their greed. We call it charitable giving and to me the giving part of this feels essential, both for the charities and for our own sense of ourselves as ethical and generous people playing an active role in our society.
There is of course, a bigger question in this: how should we fund the things we care about? Charity steps in where other areas of government and society has fallen short. Do we want to be taxed? Do we want to give? Do we want to be charged? There is so much to be done in the world. But the question of how we fund it feels like the one that we continue to avoid asking.
Read more on this…
Bertie Bosrendon gives an overview on ‘How digital in the charity sector has changed over the last 20 years’
And I’m afraid the Daily Mail are a bit worried that the Cotswolds House may be liable to flooding
Reading around the web
The unlikeliest pandemic success story (The Atlantic)
These nations offer plenty of lessons, from the importance of attentive leadership, the need to ensure that people have enough provisions and financial means to follow public-health guidance, and the shared understanding that individuals and communities must sacrifice to protect the well-being of all
Madeline Drexler reports on Bhutan, which has only had one death from Covid-19 in the past year.
History will find Trump guilty (The New Yorker)
The era of Trump will be recalled for its authoritarian politics, its lawless compulsions, and its hallucinogenic properties.
David Remnick spells out what Republican senators hope will be forgotten.
Remembering Jeremy Heywood, the civil servant who ran Britain (The Guardian)
“Jeremy did not need crises,” Brown remarked in his eulogy, “but crises needed Jeremy.”
A fascinating interview with Suzanne Heywood, who has written a memoir about the work of her husband, the former Cabinet Secretary Jeremy Heywood, who died in 2018 and remembered by four Prime Ministers at his memorial service.
The ticking time bomb inside the new world of work (FT)
people at home were promoted at about half the rate of those in the office
Pilita Clark in the FT flags up the potential downside of a flexible working culture - that if some are working from home more than others, then problems with who gets promoted and who gets the interesting projects may start to emerge.
‘My mother begged me not to go’: The Japanese women who married Koreans - and never saw their family again (The Observer)
Every May, when the acacia flowers are in full bloom, I open the window and their fragrance wafts into my room. Every time that happens, I think of home.
A quietly moving article about the work of the photographer Noriko Hayashi who has met and photographed a number of Japanese women who moved to North Korea after their marriages and haven’t returned home since.
The Student and the Algorithm: How the exam result’s fiasco threatened one student’s future (The Guardian)
What’s bizarre to me is that we’ve created a system where so much rests on something that’s so inaccurate
I guess it is not a surprise that I picked out this Guardian longread that examines the impact of last summer’s A Level exam results through the eyes of one student, and the threat to the future that he was trying to carve out for himself.
Until next time…