This Monday saw the start of a new lottery – doubtlessly a sign of an oncoming Sodom and Gomorrah-style ending to Britain in a gambling frenzy. But don’t worry, it’s all okay. The Monday Lottery gives more money to charity than the National Lottery does.
Charity is an impressive figleaf that can be used to cover up a multitude of flaws. As long as you’re doing it for charity, you can pretty much do whatever you feel like with your money.
The Monday Lottery, for example, has cherry-picked out the most consumer friendly charities. Amidst all the cancer funds and kids’ charities, you’re unlikely to find an asylum-seeker. But still, all the other charities were willing to sign up to what amounts to a free-for-all without worrying too much about that.
It’s just the latest move by charities becoming more corporate in their attitudes. In part, it’s inescapable: some of the biggest charities need to be so large to fund research. But that doesn’t excuse the corporate excess that now characterises much of the charity sector.
The amounts that charities spend on promoting themselves, not to mention keeping their own headquarters in business, is astounding. In a wave of financial releases for charities in 2002, it was revealed that Amnesty spent over half of its money on publicity and administration, whilst the NSPCC’s ‘Full Stop’ advertising campaign cost £20m.
A private company can spend its money on whatever it wants to. But charities have a responsibility to the people whose money they have taken. They have two choices: either spend the money responsibly, or give a realistic portrayal of how the money would be spent.
But it seems doubtful that the next round of Cancer Research adverts will replace the sad, doe-eyed children with deskbound bureaucrats.
It’s impossible to have respect for the corporate behemoths that many charities have become. Some of the creepier fundraising ads on telly are so cynically put together than you can feel the icy fingers of consumerism make their way out of the screen – just think of the overpolished works of the RSPCA and Cancer Research. Brrrrrr. That little cancer girl has to be one of the most terrifying effigies of capitalism around today – and that’s not what charities should be there for.
I used to do a lot of collecting myself. Nothing beat that smug feeling that I was raising money. I was one proud boy with a bucket. But few people ever stuck with it. You knew that the money you raised would, in all likelihood, be used on the charity’s machinery rather than its supposed aim as an organisation.
It got to the point that people would only collect if there was some substantial personal gain, be it food (always the way to my heart) or even holidays. The charitable spirit that many people started with was beaten out of them by the way that money would be raised.
There are plenty of local charities that don’t have the fundraising muscle of the big names, and they’re much more likely to be able to put your money to good use. If charities expect to keep having people’s support then they can’t condescend them at the same time.
