shocked at charities..

[cuckoooo]

My brother is an auditor in the charity sector and he was telling me that the big charities, particularly the 'sponsor a child' ones are pointless.

He was telling me that the biggest childrens charity - UNICEF - only 14p in the pound gets spent on actual causes the rest of the money goes to advertising, offices and staff costs. He also added that Unicef's boss has a company Rolls Royce and $1.2m salary.

He said for worldvision/plan uk/save the children only between 15p and 23p in the pound gets to the children sponsored and not even directly to the child - just allocated to the local area. The majority of costs are rent, advertising, mysterious 'consulting' costs, and staff costs. He said they have swanky offices in really expensive places - Belgravia/Mayfair etc and the execs have high-ish salaries with lots of perks (chauffeur, paid holidays, lots of annual leave etc)

He said Red Cross was the worst offender of all, but wouldn't go into details.

I just felt a little outraged, though not entirely surprised. It feels like that even the good things of this world are corrupt.

So OP since your initial post is wrong are you going to apologise or ask MN to delete it? You wouldn't want people to think you deliberately set out to smear certain charities by using inaccurate data and implying your DB had confidential information, would you?

FWIW most charities have a very good percentage split and I'd much rather give to a charity that has clear audited accounts with the charity commission than give to some unknown charity with no accountability or impact statements.

Or you could have looked it up yourself op and then you'd know you were talking shit.

You could at least have picked two charities that have the same auditors if you wanted to seem remotely credible.

I'm a charity fundraiser, although I don't get paid £40k and am slightly staggered that someone is. In fact, I flat out disbelieve a small local hospice is paying £40k for a fundraising officer post or that they would offer it to a random volunteer. That can't be a fundraiser role - maybe a head of fundraising who is managing a team 5-10 people and bringing in several million pounds perhaps?

For comparison, my OH is a fundraising manager and earns £32k to bring in £3m per annum minimum (with his team - he has 5 people working for him atm in fundraising).

I'm a fundraising officer and am paid £23k to bring in £120k as my personal target. I am also responsible for press, communications, marketing, events, and outreach and engagement. As a note, I also have raised £10k in my own time as a volunteer for.my.charity and I'm not unusual. A fundraiser friend of mine ran the London marathon last year for her charity. Another did the great Scottish swim. Generally we are a pretty committed lot. We aren't doing it for cash - I could earn a lot more elsewhere - and we do love our work. But we do have bills to pay - if I won the lottery I'd do my job for free, but until then I do think this is the most effective way to bring in that money.

I used to run a small international charity. 99%+ of donations went straight out to be spent directly on the charity's work in Africa. Barely a penny in the pound got spent in the UK.

Why do you think so many ex MPs go to be Directors of charities? They earn salaries far in excess of the Prime Minister.
Glad to hear the Salvation Army is honest; that is the one I support, apart from small local hospice.

Try working in the voluntary sector, OP. It's actually v badly paid, in comparison with similar jobs in other sectors. Or do you think they should all be staffed by unqualified unskilled people, with no membership liaison, campaigning, awareness raising, media work, etc? Presumably you do.

Ever heard of "you have to speculate to accumulate"?

Charities need the right people with the right skills working for them to enable them to meet their charitable goals. That doesn't happen for free!

I don't believe a word that the op has posted though

I don't give to large charities for this reason especially those with staff on more than the average wage.

Small charities tend to be mainly volunteers and more of the funds raised goes to the actual cause so I favour them.

No matter where you live, you really wouldn't get someone with the necessary experience, qualifications and contacts for less than £40K.

They did, clearly they thought he had all that and was doing it for free.

In fact, I flat out disbelieve a small local hospice is paying £40k for a fundraising officer post or that they would offer it to a random volunteer

Are you accusing me of lying?

I wouldn't have been taken aback at a salary in the £25k region. We are not talking about a random volunteer, this is a retired "executive" type gentleman who was already raising hundreds of thousands of pounds without payment who was asked to apply. He wasn't "offered" the job as he didn't pursue it after the salary was mentioned.

I'm pretty sure that the yield of chuggers is closer to 14% than 74%.

I agree with pps that (1) there are better and worse charities to support but (2) raw figures aren't necessarily the way to work that out.

So basically the OP has spouted a load of rubbish and hasn't returned

Par for the course then

For anyone interested in the topic in a real way I would highly recommend a watch of this 'TED Talks'

www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about_charity_is_dead_wrong?language=en

To be run properly charities need to be run professionally, and yes that means paying their staff. In the vast majority of cases however charity staff are paid around 20% less than market ratesfor equivalent jobs in other sectors. And that's on the whole ok as for most the job itself is the pull. There are some bad eggs out there, but Kids Company really isn't the way the vast majority of the sector operates.

Charity funding and the percentages assigned to charity causes vs running costs is no secret and very much in the public domain if you care to look. The numbers in the OP are wrong, and I would be concerned if a real auditor was giving out information whether it was true or not. The charities mentioned do not use the same auditors however so someone's talking nonsense.

Sayer Vincent is the auditor for Unicef, KPMG is the auditor for Save The Children, Deloitte is the auditor for British Red Cross, does your brother work for all of these companies?? If he is saying that they are lying in their annual accounts then, as auditor, they are also lying that the accounts are true and fair and the financial statements as a whole are consistent. That's a pretty big statement and he should whistleblow as he has a duty to do so, as an auditor, of course. Or had all this just been made up, eh?

The figures you are quoting appear to be untrue OP, are you going to return to that point? Much of big charities' work is lobbying and courting major donors as well as corporates. A certain amount of gloss, and location is needed for that. And if I am going to run a multi million pound international operation under an intense spotlight you betcha I want to be paid properly for it.

This kind of lack of understanding is partly why food banks do quite well on donations, people know that 100% of the tin of beans they give goes where they expect.

Why do you think so many ex MPs go to be Directors of charities? They earn salaries far in excess of the Prime Minister.

MPs take Directorships of commercial companies - and yes they get paid a ridiculous amount for that, but people who are on the Board of Trustees of a charity are VOLUNTEERS and earn nothing.

I'm a professional fundraiser for a medium sized charity. Most of my fundraising colleagues earn less than £30k. £40k for a fundraiser who's not a manager would be way above our pay scales.

Oh and I bring in around 10 times my salary, doing a skilled job that a keen but inexperienced volunteer could not do.

I used to work with various charities as part of my job. The pay was excellent and they wasted a fair amount on networking/buffets for meetings etc etc. Nevertheless the work we and they did made a massive difference to a lot of people's lives.
Unfortunately we don't live in a perfect world.

Your figures are way out. That's all.

OneMagnumisneverenough - I think there has been some misunderstanding, because that figure isn't normal for the sector.

Ever heard of "you have to speculate to accumulate"?

I think that one's a bit of an alien concept on MN when it comes to charities.

Are there really that many people paying £x a month in child sponsorship who haven't bothered to do the simplest search on the relevant charity websites to see how it works and how their money is spent? As a previous poster said there's some pretty strong ethical reasons why money generally doesn't go straight to the sponsored child. It almost always goes to the community they live in.

I would have thought it rather obvious that if you want to make more money, you spend more on marketing.

Money gets donated specifically for marketing and media, then it is restricted funds and has to be used for advertising etc

Have you noticed how the press are punting out all of these stories about outrageous charity salaries at the same time that local and central government are starting to slash funding to charities. Same way the press was full of benefit scroungers when benefits were slashed across the board. Funny that.

I do accounts for 3 charities. Believe me, there's nothing plush about the third sector. They're expected to meet business standards on little money, trustees are volunteers and overheads are high and rarely funded.

I don't have a house and my children don't go to private school.

But your brother probably knows better.

Someone upthread mention something about salary costs being a high percentage of a charity's income. This is a red herring. most charities provide services rather than handing out money to beneficiaries and so they need to pay salaries for staff to provide the service.

Yes you can use volunteers, and where I work we have more volunteers than paid staff. However, most of these volunteers work one or possibly two days a week. Our volunteers do include professionally qualified practitioners ( clinical, legal) but there is no way we could run our services relying just on volunteers. It would be impossible. And our professional staff don't earn anything like they could do in the private sector.

No one works for a charity for the money. I took a £7k pay cut to come to the charity sector.