Thomas Scovell

It was the birthday of a friend’s child this week, which helped me select my charity – Save the Children. Like many of the larger international charities they have a well established chapter in New Zealand who operate on both a local and global level.

I had to do some digging to find a children’s charity I was happy with. Too many focus on individual child sponsorship or are Christian affiliated. It is a pity that secular charities can’t state this as plainly in their marketing material as most religious charities state otherwise.

I came across Charity Navigator – which “rates” the performance of non-profits – while trying to find a charity that suited. They are fairly comprehensive, but their focus is on compiling data from the financial filings of charities that operate in the USA – so for the most part the assessments are fairly useless. That is, most charities have gotten the message they must minimise their head-office administrative costs and marketing spend – but this does little to tell you about how well they spend their money “on the ground”. They also have comment boards for each charity but, from my brief venture into them, they seem to be a battleground of extreme opinions and are best avoided.

The Save the Children donation process is a secure form hosted on a 3rd party site. This seemed a little clunky and wasn’t very well styled – as is often the case – but worked fine. Immediately after donating they presented a link to download a PDF receipt – but didn’t follow this up with an email. For those who manage their life through their inbox this might be a pain. And I wonder if they’ll spam me in the future at all, as their site has plenty of calls-to-action to join mailing lists and the donation process didn’t ask for permission for future contact. I don’t mind reasonable email contact from charities I donate to at all.

The donation process also asked which campaign I wanted to donate to – which is useful as I like being able to choose when a charity has a number of areas they work in (I went for Rewrite the Future which focuses on education for children in war torn regions) – however, to do so I had to type the campaign name into a free form field. Which implies some back end inefficiencies to process these which will eat up some of my donation.

Still, not a bad charity experience from Save the Children.

Update on Rainbow Youth donation from last week: Someone from the organisation contacted me back swiftly after I emailed about the problem with their donation process. So I feel confident recommending them.

Update on Oxfam Haiti campaign donation: I got some postal spam from them today – with a thank you note and receipt. Given I’d already been emailed a receipt this seems an unnecessary expense which I’d prefer charities to let me opt out of.