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Australian charity donation platforms compared (Updated)

May 2, 2017 / / 24 Comments

ChangePath isn’t just a charity assessment website. We’re a not-for-profit ourselves. In order to continue to exist in any kind of sustainable form, we need to be able to accept donations. You might assume this is a relatively easy task (every charity needs some way of raising money) but there’s a blizzard of potential web platforms out there competing to do so. To help small charities cut through this thicket of marketing, we’ve put together a short guide to the major Australian platforms, what they’re good at, and how to decide between them.

As you would imagine, these platforms aren’t directly comparable – some offer services that others do not, or have a different focus. The solutions that a large charity would be looking for are very different to what a newly established charity is interested in. For this article we’re looking at the sector from the perspective of a small Australian not-for-profit looking to raise money because, well, that’s what we are.

(Note: This article will only be good for a few months. Web payment platforms change their prices and offerings so often that anything published on the topic will quickly be out of date. Also, I’m not getting paid by any of these guys.)

Update Feb 2018: Added one new platform, other minor updates. If you would like your platform to be listed in this article, just let me know in the comments.

 

What donation platforms do

Let’s take a step back. What do payment platforms actually do, and how are they helpful to your non-profit? Obviously, not all platforms offer all services, but these are some of the basic facilities that many provide.

Hosting donation pages

The bread-and-butter of many online payment platforms, they will host a donations page on your behalf, collect donations, and send the proceeds to you. This means you don’t need to worry about receipts or credit card compliance. They do, however, generally take a cut of the donations you receive.

Allowing others to fundraise on your behalf

Larger platforms will often allow members of the public to create personal fundraising pages that collect money for your cause. This allows your supporters to get more actively involved and can be an entirely new donation stream. It’s especially good for social media, as it allows supporters to reach out to their friends and family easily.

Hosting events

A newer addition is that some platforms will actually host entire events, occasionally handling registration and ticketing as well as donations and a web presence.

 

Sidenote: State-by-state registration

Charities hoping to fundraise across Australia need to register for permission to fundraise in every state and territory they hope to do so.

This is generally free, but does require a bit of paperwork and means you must have an auditor. Some more stringent states (such as WA) require all office-holders to provide current police checks.

A comprehensive guide to fundraising legislation can be found at the Funding Centre.

In general, it pays to ask whether you will need to apply in any particular state – online fundraising especially is a bit of a grey area, and many states have unwritten rules about what they consider to be in-state fundraising and what they don’t. In general, it seems like you should have fundraising permission in at least one state (preferably your home state) and then check with all the other states whether you actually need to get their license. We found that WA and QLD are both happy to waive the requirement for a license as long as you don’t do any direct marketing to their residents, but it’s a fine line. Just send an email to confirm within your particular circumstances – better to have it in writing from the source.

Comparing charity payment platforms

This is not an exhaustive list of payment platforms, but it covers the major ones that accept Australian dollars as standard [act_tooltip title=’1′ content=’Companies that work in other currencies will mean that you lose out in exorbitant currency conversion fees on top of the ordinary costs.’].

The way these platforms generally make their money is by taking a cut of all donations that pass through their doors. As you’ll see, the amounts they charge vary but they’re often around 5%. They can also charge fees to join or annually.

Also, because I don’t want anyone to think that I’m implicitly endorsing anyone, they’re in alphabetical order.  (I’ll explicitly endorse some platforms at the end, don’t worry).

 

Benojo

Fees: None

Cut: Credit card charges only: 1.4% + 30c

Who can register: Any ACNC registered charity.

Pricing information: https://benojo.com/pricing/

Website: https://benojo.com/

Benojo offer a quite slick online fundraising service, especially considering it’s very low cost. There are donation, fundraising, ticketing, payroll giving and volunteering tools.

 

DonatePlanet

Fees: Annual fee of $95

Cut:  5.5% fee, plus 2.2% credit card fees

Who can register: You don’t need to be ACNC registered, or even an organisation – you can raise funds directly through an appeal linked to the Donate Planet Foundation Limited.

Pricing information: https://donateplanet.com/faqs/

Website: https://donateplanet.com/

DonatePlanet are a Sydney-based not-for-profit that hosts donation pages for charities as well as fundraiser pages. Fundraiser pages are relatively slick but minimalist – you get a single photo and some text. They don’t pass on details of donors (aside from name and amount donated), which is good from a donor perspective but might be less valuable to charities.

 

enablr

Fees: None

Cut:  0% for small-to-medium sized charities, 2.5% for large charities (plus 0.65%+10c credit card fee for all transactions regardless of charity size)

Who can register: “Charities and not-for-profits”, though there appears to be a company registration as well.

Pricing information: https://enablr.org.au/why-enablr

Website: https://enablr.org.au/

A new service as of late 2017, enablr is a slick, highly functional fundraising platform with an almost unbeatable cost structure.  Offers individual donations, peer-to-peer donations, campaigns, events, and a suite of products. Worth a look.

 

everydayhero

Fees: Annual $600+GST fee

Cut:  6.5% plus merchant transaction fees (1% to 2.45%)

Who can register: Charities, sporting clubs, schools and other organisations.

Pricing information: https://partner.help-au.everydayhero.com/hc/en-us/articles/201705937-Australia

Website: https://www.everydayhero.com/uk/

One of the larger services, everydayhero offers extremely slick fundraising pages mainly based around events and allowing the public to fundraise on your behalf. This doesn’t come cheap though – they’re one of the most expensive platforms both in terms of annual cost and per donation. Aimed mainly at larger, established charities.

 

Givebot

Fees: None

Cut:  6% fee plus credit card charges (1.4%-3%)

Who can register:  Charities

Pricing information: http://givebot.co/fees

Website: http://givebot.co/

Givebot is slightly different to the rest of the platforms on this list – donors pay via a chatbot in Facebook Messenger, rather than through a webpage. Charities can add a single image as well as some conversational text about their cause. Note that you will need to provide information on where the money has gone to every donor.

 

GiveEasy

Fees: Varies by plan (None to $199 per month)

Cut:  5.5% for free, down to 3.5% for biggest plan

Who can register: Unknown

Pricing information: https://www.giveeasy.org/campaign-pricing/

Website: https://www.giveeasy.org/

Interestingly, GiveEasy offers not just a fundraising platform, but also app building and a number of other more bespoke services. They also have a tiered funding model, where you get different services depending on how much you pay monthly. The fundraising pages are quite slick, with some nice editing ability.

 

GiveMatcher (possibly defunct)

Fees: None

Cut:  If they’re your only fundraising platform and you raise less than $5m, 0% (not including a 1.5% credit card fee). Large charities are charged 3.4% if they’re your preferred fundraising platform, 4.5% if they’re listed as an option on your fundraising page, and 6% otherwise.

Who can register: Must be a charity (registered with ACNC) as well as have an ABN

Pricing information: https://www.givematcher.com.au/faqs-for-charities

Website: https://www.givematcher.com.au/

GiveMatcher has two ways it tries to differentiate itself from the pack – a 0% charge for small charities (assuming you fundraise exclusively with them) and the fact that philanthropists can match donations. It hosts events, campaigns and fundraisers, with slick and well-produced fundraising pages where you can have updates and messages from donors. The only caveat is their strict criteria – you must be registered with the ACNC to take part. Their site has been down for some time now, and they aren’t answering questions, so they may be no longer in operation.

 

GiveNow

Fees: None

Cut:  Credit card fees only (0.30-0.90% for Visa and Mastercard, depending on DGR status, and 1.43% for Amex.) Direct debit has no fee

Who can register: All not-for-profit and community organisations which are incorporated. No political parties or individuals.

Pricing information: https://www.givenow.com.au/about/faq

Website: https://www.givenow.com.au/

GiveNow has the honour of being the cheapest platform for charities, with no annual fees, no service fee and less than 1% credit card fees no matter what size the organisation. They’ve had a recent update that’s expanded their feature set to include goal-based funding and different fundraising campaigns under each charity, which is a welcome addition. The features on offer are kept to the essentials – members of the public can’t set up fundraisers, for instance, and there’s no events functionality. Charities can set up a fundraising page and that’s more or less it. Then again, it is free. Great for small charities and not-for-profits.

 

GoFundraise

Fees: Plans – from free to $230 to ‘Price on application’.

Cut:  6% fee (4.95% if you pay for the premium plan) plus 1.1% – 2.1% credit card fees

Who can register: Need to be registered Australian charity.

Pricing information: https://support.gofundraise.com/hc/en-us/articles/201282100-Signing-Up-to-GoFundraise-as-a-Charity-FAQs

Website: https://www.gofundraise.com.au/

GoFundraise is heavily focused on individual fundraisers and events. Despite a very nice homepage, the actual fundraising pages on GoFundraise aren’t actually that sharp. The events pages, which also have the option to coordinate ticket sales, are by contrast rather nice. They’ve also introduced reduced-rate fundraising pages (0.49% fee).

 

JustGiving

Fees: None

Cut:  5% fee on online donations, plus 1.65% processing fee

Who can register: Must be registered Australian charity or non-profit

Pricing information: https://pages.justgiving.com/charities.html

Website: https://www.justgiving.com/

The only international entrant, JustGiving is based in the UK but has a few Australian charities that utilise it. The charity pages are, just from personal opinion, some of the nicest I’ve seen design-wise though without donor input would look rather sparse.

 

mycause

Fees: None

Cut:  Varies by charity. Fees average 5% of gross donations, plus credit card fees

Who can register: Must be registered with the ACNC

Pricing information: https://mycause.zendesk.com/hc/en-us

Website: https://www.mycause.com.au/

mycause allows crowdfunding as well as donations, but has a heavy focus on donor-led campaigns rather than direct fundraising. Charity pages are decent, and obviously allow charities to change the colour of the page as well as the images, but the real focus in on people-to-people fundraising. The non-transparent funding model is a turn-off, as fees “average” 5% of donations, varying depending on the agreement with mycause.  You can get a 50% off discount if you put the mycause logo on your website.

 

MyGivingCircle

Fees: None

Cut:  6.5% fee plus credit card charges (usually around 1.5%)

Who can register:  Charities and not-for-profits.

Pricing information: https://mygivingcircle.org/fees/

Website: https://mygivingcircle.org/

An interesting twist on the donation page where the charities ‘compete’ to get additional funding – the more donors or donations they get, the more likely they are to win. It’s an interesting concept, see if it fits in with your fundraising strategy. The donation pages are relatively clean with a few design quirks.

 

Sidenote: collecting online donations directly

Of course, these platforms aren’t the only way to raise money. If you’re just looking to fundraise directly, you can put a donation button on your website and avoid registering with these platforms altogether. This has some benefits, such as meaning you are more in control of the design of your fundraising page and you have more flexibility in how you fundraise. It also comes with different risks. Handling your own donations may mean more development time on your website, and depending on the platform you use may mean you need to be worried about compliance issues.

This should go without saying, but don’t put a form on your website to collect credit card information unless you’re ultra-sure that your security and compliance are 100%. If your finance team and IT team aren’t best buddies, don’t do it. PCI DSS is no joke, and if you’re found to be non-compliant you’re in a world of pain (and by pain I mean fines and sanctions, including no longer being allowed to have a bank account). If you don’t know what PCI DSS is, step away, do not pass go.

In terms of pure payment platforms the giant in the space is PayPal, which allows charities to put a simple ‘donate here’ button on their website which directly links to their bank accounts. Starting at 2.6% (+ 30c) per donation and reducing to 1.1% at the top, it’s better than many of the platforms we’ve talked about above, and if you’re an ACNC registered charity they will reduce that down to 1.1%. Obviously you don’t get any of the fancier features of the platforms above (such as person-to-person fundraising) but it can be a good option.

Another potential option is Stripe, and though this is slightly more technical to install it has a substantial amount more customisability. It’s also cheaper than PayPal, at 1.75% + 30c per transaction.

 

Conclusions

From a certain perspective, it looks like we’re quibbling over small change – so what if they charge 6.5% rather than 5.5%? And yet because it’s over every transaction, those tiny discrepancies really add up. If a platform has services that you can’t do without, then by all means use them. But track it, and make sure that you’re getting more benefit than cost.

Personally, here’s some takeaways:

  • Enablr is a leading contender, with excellent rates and a strong offering. They are (at this stage) new, so we will have to see how it works over the longer term, but for the moment it’s a good option. The same can be said for Benojo.
  • GiveNow is free and has all the essentials, especially following their recent update. This is what ChangePath has chosen.
  • Beyond that, each of the platforms have positives and negatives. There’s nothing stopping you registering on multiple platforms (well, aside from GiveMatcher’s funding scheme).
Photo: Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade

Financials, charity health, and World Vision

March 13, 2017 / / 0 Comments

At ChangePath, we rely heavily on financial statements to assess the financial health of a charity. Our methods are relatively simplistic, and they aim to give a very basic metric for understanding if a charity is being managed well or poorly. Given these limitations, we shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking that financial statements give us the whole picture.

Let’s look at a case in point: World Vision Australia. Tim Costello, the CEO, has talked about how Australian giving is waning and that “this has been the worst time of my life in 12 years at World Vision” [act_tooltip title=’1′ content=’Pro Bono Australia, 10th March 2016 ‘]. Last year, World Vision laid off 89 staff out of around 500 full-time, blaming the falling Australian dollar and the fact that child sponsorship has dropped from 80 per cent of the organisation’s revenue to 43 per cent in just over a decade [act_tooltip title=’2′ content=’Pro Bono Australia, 17th November 2015‘]. According to Tim Costello, this is an exceptionally tough time at World Vision.

And yet, a superficial glance at the financial statements appears to tell a different story. Revenue has steadily increased over the last four years, from 343m (2012) to 370m (2013) to 380m (2014) to $424m (2015). Donations are similarly rising slowly, from 287m to 307m to 309m. The balance sheet is healthy, and they have been relatively good at keeping expenses in line with revenue. While they did lose $1m in 2013, World Vision Australia posted a $21m surplus in 2014. A brief look at the numbers appears to show a charity in great financial health.

When finances and words diverge

So what’s going on here? Is Tim Costello lying? This seems very unlikely – charity CEOs don’t lay off staff without very good reasons, especially when it represents almost a fifth of all full-time employees. People are expensive to hire and train, and layoffs are terrible for morale. Occam’s razor would suggest that World Vision Australia is telling the truth and is indeed going through tough times [act_tooltip title=’3′ content=’With that said, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the cause of World Vision’s problems are actually (or entirely) the ones they say they are. It seems likely that the fall in the Australian dollar is a big part of the problem, but there are likely to be other factors.’].

More likely, what this illustrates is a few key problems with using financial statements to understand charities. First and foremost, you’re only looking at a snapshot back in time, often quite far back. When Tim Costello was quoted as saying it was the ‘worst time’, the most recent financial statements available were from the end of September 2014, nearly two years earlier. This is because you can’t write the financial statements until the end of the financial year, and it generally takes a few months for the final statements to be written and approved. So there’s close to a year-and-a-half gap between what’s actually going on and the financial information we have. The Australian dollar didn’t start its latest fall until just after that report was published, in October 2014, and the effects wouldn’t have been felt until sometime in 2015 at the earliest.

Even now in March 2017, a full year since the original news article, we’re still not much wiser about what exactly was happening in early 2016. The latest annual report available (as of March 2017) only gives figures until September 2015. Even then, there were a few mentions of hard times – the Board Chair’s report refers to it as a ‘challenging year’, which speaks volumes when you consider the rarity of hearing negative news in the introduction.

Another important point is that three years and the headline figures aren’t always enough context to see long term trends. While donations have been rising slowly for the last three years, to understand the strategic direction of World Vision you need to go back five, maybe 10 years and look at the trends.
Finally, it illustrates how relying on the big picture numbers can lead you to miss important events and get a warped understanding of the health of an organisation. If you just looked at the headline revenue figure in the 2015 financial report, you’d think World Vision was a picture of health, with steady revenue growth from the previous year. Yet a bit of digging reveals worrying trends. Child sponsorship income, by far the largest single income source and an important source of recurring funding, declined from $194 million to $186 million. This was masked by a significant uptick in donations of goods and in grants. Yet as the report notes on page 28, “the future for grant income remains uncertain”, and given that grant income generally funds specific projects rather than the running of the charity itself, it can create significant issues.

Of course, as with any media story, the way it is pitched is important. Look at the way they have phrased it – ‘child sponsorship had dropped from 80 per cent of the organisation’s revenue to 43 per cent’. This says nothing about the absolute numbers, only the relative numbers. Are donations falling and other types of revenue are taking up the slack? Or are donations rising but other forms of fundraising are rising faster? Without analysing the financials for ten years, it’s difficult to say.

It will be very interesting to see what the 2016 financial statements show when they’re released. I’ll update this article once they’re available.

 

Sources:
http://probonoaustralia.com.au/news/2016/03/political-leaders-to-blame-for-loss-of-charity-costello/
http://probonoaustralia.com.au/news/2014/07/fewer-aussies-giving-more-to-charity/
http://www.philanthropy.org.au/tools-resources/fast-facts-and-stats/
https://www.qut.edu.au/research/research-projects/giving-australia-2015-2016
http://www.roymorgan.com/findings/5657-fewer-aussies-donating-to-charity-201406300152
http://australiancharities.acnc.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Australian-Charities-Report-Summary-FinalWeb.pdf

 

charity street fundraising

Face to face fundraisers and why charities hire them

February 7, 2017 / / 1 Comment

We all see the charity fundraisers in the streets, trying to attract your attention as you desperately stare at your phone in a vain attempt not to be noticed.

Opinion polls suggest high levels of public hostility towards street fundraisers, also known as “chuggers” (a portmanteau of “charity mugger”), with as many as 80 per cent of those interviewed being against them. Even I’ll confess to not liking them, and I’ve worked in charities for years.

Recent articles, like this one, have come out swinging against these fundraising tactics. Not only that, but these services are famously costly for the charities. This is a reputational risk for the charity as well as a monetary loss.

So if they annoy donors, are hugely expensive, and give the charity a bad name, why on earth do they keep being hired?

The chugger balancing act

For charities, street fundraisers represent a tradeoff. They know that face-to-face fundraising isn’t well liked, and it does put a bit of a dent in their reputation. But it’s very effective, especially at finding people willing to give a recurring donation.

It’s long-term sustainable revenue like that (people giving a few dollars a month) that allows charities to plan for the future slightly better. Most charity revenue is one-time – an event, a fundraiser, a day, or a bequest. This means that one rained out event, or one cancelled fundraiser, has the potential to seriously dent the numbers. Recurring donors, by contrast, give charities a fairly stable stream of money which they can then allocate to research, advocacy, or whatever they choose.

People with recurrent donations also give more – one study found average recurring donor will give 42% more in one year than those who give one-time gifts. Cynics would argue that donors forget about the recurrent funding and thus spend more on the charity than they would if you asked them for a lump sum, but it’s also intimately tied in with the psychology of how humans value money now vs money in the future.

Donors with recurrent funding are rarely donors for life, but they last much longer than ‘one-time-only’ donors. The average length of time they maintain their donation is 4 years. “Over 70% of people that we recruit into organizations never come back and make another gift,” says Dr. Adrian Sargeant, Professor of Fundraising at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University. Whereas 80% of monthly giving donors are still there a year later.

And donations aren’t the only factor. Street fundraisers also help to raise awareness of a charity, though this is somewhat counterbalanced by the slightly negative associations with chuggers.

Effectively, the simple fact is that charities wouldn’t employ these fundraisers if they didn’t believe the tradeoff was worth it. Indeed, I know a number of charities held off on doing face-to-face because they were worried about the reputation damage. But then they, like a lot of other charities, realised that they were simply ceding donors to other charities who were willing to do it.

 

The numbers don’t lie

To look at just how influential face to face and recurrent donors are, you need to look deep in the bowels of charity financial reports. Most charities won’t pull out their face-to-face numbers but thanks to the Charitable Fundraising Act (1991), NSW charities have to provide some details on where their fundraising comes from. After a quick trawl through some annual reports I’ve found two that actually give broken down numbers: Cancer Council NSW and Amnesty International. They tell different but related stories.

Amnesty International is, thanks to its ‘sponsor a child’ program, one of the most heavily weighted towards recurring donations. Looking at the Amnesty International financial breakdown (Note 19, page 31), you can see just how heavily they rely on regular giving. Of their $25m in fundraising revenue, a full $21m is regular giving.

Looking at the Cancer Council figures (note 22, page 39), you can see that face to face revenue is not as significant ($15m in revenue out of $83m) but it’s still the second-largest source of funds after bequests. By comparison, Daffodil Day raises less than $3m.

Of course, we’re confusing two very different issues here – recurrent donations are not only raised from face-to-face fundraising. Most charity websites now offer a ‘regular donor’ option, and often irregular donors will be contacted to try and get them to upgrade to being more recurrent. Yet face-to-face remains a key part of the fundraising mix and the one of the most successful at getting regular donors.

I do feel for the poor fundraisers. I’ve worked with several face-to-face fundraising organisations during my time at charities, and they’re generally full of young, friendly people. It’s a thankless, soul-sucking job, and they’re actually doing a better job for charities than most people realise. Of course, you’d be far better to donate directly to a charity on a regular basis, thus cutting out the middleman, but in the absence of everyone doing that they will continue to walk the streets.

How to give money over the holiday season

December 8, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Christmas, the saying goes, is the season for giving. While the giving of gifts is a relatively recent invention (post-1880), the spirit of generosity is now inseparable from the holidays. A third of people say that they are more likely to give a donation to charity over the festive season. This willingness to share and connection with our fellow human beings is indisputably a wonderful thing. But with so many ways to give, it’s not always easy to know what the best ways are. Here’s some things to keep in mind.

 

Where you donate matters

Charities have come up with a huge variety of different ways to raise funds in connection with the holidays. Some of them are better than others, however.

Online

From a charity perspective the best way is almost certainly a direct donation. Most charities will have some kind of online or phone donation option, and these are almost certainly the fundraising option that costs charities least. It’s worth noting as well that recurring donations are far more valuable to charities, if only because they’re a stable and reliable source of income in an industry sorely lacking in them.

Street donations

Chuggers are everyone’s favourite punching bag in the charity space. Nobody likes being approached by them when they’re just looking to go quietly about their business. Yet because they are a sustainable source of long-term income, charities use them. Chuggers are a vital part of many charity’s revenue streams. But for you, the discerning donor, they’re not a great way to donate. Having people on the streets is labour intensive, so it’s costly for the charity. A good proportion of your donation will go straight to the company running the

Charity balls

The holidays also seem to coincide with party season. Events can be an excellent way to raise money for charity, but be careful. The more glitzy the event, the more expensive it is to run. Charities wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t helpful, of course, but be aware that a significant proportion of the money raised on the night goes to pay for all the fancy food and wine and entertainment. Small events, especially community-organised ones, are often much more efficient at passing money on (but earn less individually).

Holiday cards/gifts

Charity holiday cards are also a significant donation strategy. These are actually a relatively good way to give money, as the charity can generally make a fair margin on the cards and they also act as promotional material. Be wary if you’re not buying cards directly from the charity themselves, though – the proportion of the purchase price that goes to the charity can vary wildly. 25% is a good minimum benchmark.

Volunteering is donating too

Your time can be more valuable to a charity than any amount of money you give them. There are a range of ways you can help, from running fundraisers at your workplace, to traditional soup-kitchen style volunteering, to donating your specialist skills and expertise. Ask the charity of your choice and they will have a range of ways for you to get involved.

Volunteering isn’t just for Christmas, though. Unlike donations, charities can’t “store up” volunteering until they need it. Often, they will get a big uptick in volunteering during the holidays that then disappears for the rest of the year. This feast or famine situation can give charities a serious headache. So when you volunteer, commit to doing so for at least a few months after the holiday period – it will be a lot more valuable to the charity, and you’ll get a lot more out of it as well.

 

How you donate matters

It’s not just the method you use to give money, there’s a few other things to keep in mind to make your donation most effective.

Don’t be specific

In general, it’s far better to let charities decide where your donation should be spent rather than being prescriptive. The more specific donors are, the more hamstrung the charity will be and the less strategically they can plan. For example, if a charity wants to run an exciting new program but all the donations are tied to specific issue, they may not be able to. Charities can also find it difficult to fund necessary day-to-day expenses (from auditors to phone operators) if their funds are constrained. In general, if you trust a charity enough to give them money, you should trust them enough that they know the best way to spend it.

Don’t spread yourself thin

Donating relatively large amounts to a few charities is, in general, better than a lot of small donations to many charities. This is mostly due to transaction costs – the smaller the donation, the more gets eaten up by credit card fees or handling fees or other things like that.

 

What you donate to matters

This shouldn’t come as a surprise – what you donate to (both in terms of cause and specific charity) makes a huge difference in terms of the change that your donation can create.

The best places to donate

If you want to make sure that your donation goes where it will do the most good, there are a few organisations that do rigorous assessments of charities to really pick the cream of the crop.

Of course, there are a lot of assumptions that underpin these sites (they mainly assume that saving human lives is the best thing a charity can do, which is an uncontroversial but not universally held belief), but in general they will recommend charities that will do enormous amounts of good with your donation.

The best of the rest

Not all of us are quite selfless enough to donate to where the need is absolutely greatest. And that’s not the only factor to consider – if you’re more likely to donate to a particular cause because it’s close to your heart, and thus likely to donate more and more often, then it can actually be better for the charity sector if you focus on what you care about most.

That’s where ChangePath comes in, to help you select the best charities in the Australian not-for-profit sector. Use our guide to find the charities that most resonate with you, then select organisations that spend your money wisely and tell you how it is spent.

 

Don’t forget – charity isn’t just for Christmas

Charities work all year round. A donation during the holiday season is excellent, but charities that have huge peaks and troughs in their fundraising may find it difficult to think strategically. Plan out how much you want to donate this year now (both money and volunteering), and strive to meet that goal. You’ll feel better about it, and the charitable sector will thank you.

Photo: Tourism Victoria via Flickr

Shane Warne, spin, and what we can learn from an ugly situation

November 7, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Shane Warne’s charity hit the news some months back. Following revelations around poor financial management and intense media scrutiny, the charity folded in January. What lessons does this hold for donors and charities?

The story seems straightforward, yet a closer look reveals some useful lessons for donors and charities alike, and they’re not the lessons you might expect. First, we should have a quick recap on what happened:

  • The Shane Warne Foundation raised money for other charities using high-profile, high-cost events such as poker tournaments and dinners.
  • It was poorly financially run, losing money four out of the last five financial years, and had a series of 3 CEOs in that time. It did not make public its annual or financial reports.
  • The foundation donated to charity 16 cents of every dollar raised between 2011-13, and 24 cents of every dollar it raised in 2014-15.
  • Warne’s brother Jason was paid an $80,000 annual salary in a year that the foundation donated $54,600 to charity.
  • Consumer Affairs Victoria (CAV) began making inquiries into the foundation’s operations in July 2015 before renewing its fundraising licence. Concerns had been raised about its expenses, level of donations to beneficiaries, and the amount of money it was holding in reserve, according to a CAV statement.
  • The foundation was voluntarily shut down in January 2016. An audit ordered by consumer watchdog concluded in March that the foundation complied “in all material aspects” with the law, though the CAV has, as yet, not issued a statement on the audit result.

Of course, that’s not all there is to tell, otherwise this article would be rather boring. For the full story, you can read the SMH article as a good starting point as well as the Age and the ABC. However, as I’ll touch on later, keep your sceptical hat on as you read. This reporting is telling a story, as all media does, so it can be hard to separate out the truly relevant from the gossip and inference [act_tooltip title=’1′ content=’Of course, there is no such thing as a truly reliable narrator – I too have my own biases and the way I write about this will reflect them. But I’ll do my best to point them out as we go.’].

So, a poorly run charity that was losing money was shut down after media scrutiny uncovered the state of its finances. A fairly unremarkable story, spiced up by the involvement of a well-known celebrity. What could we possibly learn from it, other than ‘don’t be like those guys’? A fair amount, as it turns out.

Lessons learned

Transparency should be a non-negotiable when picking a charity

An obvious (and rather self-serving, for a transparency promotion organisation) point is that this story illustrates just how valuable transparency is in the charitable sector. The foundation didn’t release financial statements, a fact that was used against it in reporting. Had they released them, these problems would have come to light before they got so substantial, and potential donors would have had a far better understanding of where their money was going. We’ll never know how this would have affected the eventual outcome, but it’s hard to believe it wouldn’t have been better for both donors and the charity itself.

 

Big events are actually not great fundraisers

Glitzy, high-profile events are a staple of many large charity’s fundraising arsenals, but they have a guilty secret: compared to most ways of raising money they’re actually startlingly inefficient. The reason is obvious – luxurious events are not, by definition, cheap. Putting on a proper black-tie ball can be a staggeringly expensive proposition. Entertainment, venues, three-course meals, decorations, staffing, it adds up remarkably quickly [act_tooltip title=’2′ content=’Why aren’t those things donated? Simply put, a venue can’t give away hundreds of thousands of dollars of business on a regular basis and survive.’]. Not to mention high-risk – most costs need to be incurred ahead of time, with no certainty that the event will get enough donors to break even, much less make a good return for the charity.

Choice has pointed this out previously – “[Event costs] can mean less than half of your ticket price goes to the actual cause asking for money. In 2005, just eight per cent of proceeds from a fundraising dinner for the Children’s Cancer Institute of Australia for Medical Research made its way to actual cancer research, due to poor turnout.” For larger charities, this can still be a good investment – it allows them to gain a lot of promotion and get close to their more high-worth donors. But basing a foundation around doing nothing but big events makes budgeting a constant tightrope walk. With the benefit of hindsight, the Shane Warne Foundation’s fundraising model was a high risk, low reward proposition from the start.

 

night-television-tv-theme-machines

The media are a double-edged sword

Charities and the media have an interesting relationship. When you donate to a charity you generally don’t get anything in return aside from a fuzzy feeling and perhaps a letter of thanks. This is obvious, but it means that the reputation of the charity is absolutely paramount – if you don’t have absolute trust in the charity, you’re not likely to donate to them. This is why services like ChangePath are in such demand. But it’s also a critical factor when dealing with the media, the main source of most people’s information about charity. For not-for-profits, unlike P.T. Barnum, not all publicity is good publicity. An article that’s critical of a charity can be immensely damaging to its ability to fundraise.

And yet, charities need the media. Not only because advertising is expensive and media coverage is a cheap way to get exposure, but also thanks to the legitimising aura of major media outlets. If it isn’t being featured in newspapers, on television and in other areas, a charity is cut off from a large potential donor base it couldn’t reach in other ways. Social media is changing this to an extent, but the power of the media remains strong.

The Shane Warne Foundation is a powerful example of how influential the media can be. Far more than the investigation by Consumer Affairs Victoria, it was media coverage of the problems of the charity that led to its eventual closure. This reporting has been not exceptionally kind – the media love a good story about a charity’s downfall, especially when a celebrity is involved. The combination of moral righteousness and schadenfreude is too good to ignore. Yet this leads to reporting that could be alleged to be biased (Shane Warne certainly felt so).

Mostly it is a subtle lack of context – say, reporting that KPMG found that cash couldn’t be accounted for, ignoring the vital context that this statement is true of almost all charities and is a standard boilerplate text found in many charity annual reports. Similarly, this reporting that a former personal assistant of Shane Warne’s won one of the charity auctions, while only in the 5th paragraph was it acknowledged that this didn’t break any laws and there was no allegation of wrongdoing. This kind of reporting is pervasive throughout the discussions of the foundation, and it makes it difficult for the general public to pull aside the curtain of moral outrage to the actual facts. It also serves to reinforce some unfortunate misperceptions about charity donations that I’ll talk about a bit later.

 

The power of celebrity

Celebrities have a minor superpower – they generate news simply by existing. Otherwise mundane events, such as going out on a date or being injured, get written up in breathless prose by reporters and are lapped up by the public.

This has led to many charities bringing on ‘celebrity ambassadors’ to help increase the media coverage of their work. Running a campaign against a major disease? Boring, nobody is going to write an article about it. Running a campaign against a major disease and someone famous is at the opening? Journalists will knock down your door. This is perhaps overly cynical, but it is difficult to argue with the ability of celebrities to capture media space. Celebrities also bring a host of other benefits, such as their connections to influential donors, name recognition, and pulling power for events.

There is another side to the relationship, however. As much as people want to see celebrities doing good, they want to see them doing evil more. That means that any potential wrongdoing will be amplified and broadcasted, which can have substantial repercussions for the associated charity. How many small charities are there out there that are doing the same (or worse?) than the Shane Warne Foundation, but the media never had any interest in reporting them?

 

money

The toxicity of charities spending money

The media coverage of this debacle reveals a lot about how the media perceives charity spending, which in turn shapes the way the general public thinks about it. While this is an extreme case, the general sense that charities shouldn’t spend money on administration (or indeed anything that isn’t ‘the mission’) pervades all the coverage of this incident. This is despite long-term and repeated calls to stop fixating on charity administration and costs.

The phrase ‘only 16c out of every dollar was donated to charity’ is used in most articles about the scandal, but is delivered completely devoid of context. Is that bad? How would we know? As we saw earlier, a similar fundraising event only raised 8 cents in the dollar. Administration ratios are a notoriously terrible way to assess whether a charity is doing a good job. While 16 cents is certainly not a great total, without a more nuanced understanding of the charity’s accounts it’s impossible to say whether this was due to waste, poor management, or simply the costs of hosting the events.

Similarly, much of the reporting focused on the fact that Shane Warne’s brother was paid $80,000 as CEO. While I don’t condone nepotism (it is possible, though highly unlikely, that he was the best man for the job), we need to get over our collective fear of paying charity CEOs a competitive salary. It’s something I’ll come back to in a future article, but the phrase ‘if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys’ applies [act_tooltip title=’3′ content=’Whether they ended up with a monkey anyway despite the pay packet is left for the reader to decide.’]. With the context that the average pay for a charity CEO in Australia is $100,000, $80K seems more reasonable. As always, context is important.

Giving and giving up

The fundamental problem with many of the issues raised with the Foundation is that we don’t have a counterfactual. There’s no crystal ball to tell us what would have happened if different decisions had been made. If the Shane Warne Foundation hadn’t existed, would more money have been donated to charity, or less? The charity gave (by its own estimates) nearly $4m directly to charity over 11 years. Even if we assume that’s a bit optimistic, it’s still a very substantial amount of money. A Canadian survey found that only 19% of donors decide in advance how much money they’re going to donate over the course of a year, meaning that the amount that most people give is dependent on circumstances. If donors hadn’t been at the Shane Warne Foundation fundraising events, it’s doubtful they would have ‘replaced’ that donation by giving money elsewhere. It seems likely [act_tooltip title=’4′ content=’Though, again, without a magical device to predict outcomes, we’ll never know.’] that the Shane Warne Foundation was a net force for good while it existed, even if an inefficient and poorly run one. Perhaps there was a way for it to survive the drubbing it received and reform into a better, more efficient organisation. Perhaps not. Regardless, in its very public sinking it has lessons we should all learn.

What do you think? Are there additional lessons to take from what happened to the Shane Warne Foundation?

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Where we’re headed next

August 31, 2016 / / 1 Comment

We’ve just launched a series of huge changes to the ChangePath website, but we’re not ones to rest on our laurels. We’re already working on some big plans for the next iteration. Obviously, not all of these will come to fruition. In fact, judging by our last big update, there will be a lot of stuff left on the cutting room floor by the time we’re happy with it. But think of this as an indication of what we’re thinking about.

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A sparkler

Welcome to the next stage of ChangePath

April 10, 2016 / / 1 Comment

Welcome to ChangePath, Australia’s only charity rating organisation. We’re launching a lot of big changes today (including, in a metatextual twist, the blog this is being written on), but before I outline those let’s talk about what ChangePath is.

ChangePath exists, at a basic level, to help Australian donors and charities find each other. We’re here to help people who want to donate, but aren’t sure who to.

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Overview and rules

March 25, 2016 / / 0 Comments

What this blog is

Welcome to the ChangePath blog, here to bring together interesting articles, ideas, and discussions about charity in Australia. This is a conversational blog, not a news service or series of media releases (you can find those in our media section). Rather, it will have a series of opinion pieces on a wide range of topics. While we will always endeavour to fact-check our articles and provide sources where possible, caveat lector [act_tooltip title=”(1)” content=”I was going to say caveat emptor but you’re not really buying anything, so caveat lector it is.”] The opinions expressed are those of the authors, not of ChangePath itself (unless we say otherwise). Hopefully this will keep it lively and entertaining.

Why start a blog?

  1. To share our thinking on Australian not-for-profits and to help people to understand the benefits and pitfalls of assessing charity.
  2. To create something interesting and valuable that encourages people to visit.
  3. To give you, the visitor, the ability to add to the ChangePath discussion.

On language

At ChangePath, you will find us using ‘not-for-profit’ and ‘charity’ somewhat interchangably. This is, technically, incorrect – charities are a subset of not-for-profits, but not all not-for-profits are charities. However, this distinction is one the general public aren’t generally aware of, so we’re quite lax about it as well. If we’re referring specifically to something relevant to charities but not other not-for-profits, we’ll flag it in the sentence.

Comments and moderation

As implied by that last point, comments will be enabled on the site. This is swimming against the tide of the internet at this point, but I’m of the opinion that there’s more to gain from hearing your opinion than there is to lose from opening the internet floodgates.

This does not, however, mean I’m naïve about the way the internet works. The comments on this site will be strictly and unapologetically moderated. All of the normal things (no racism, no sexism, no bullying, no general awfulness, etc) apply, plus a general overall requirement for broadly-defined civility. Of course, you’re entitled to disagree with the content of a post as much as you like, but if you don’t do it in a civil manner your comment won’t go anywhere. This is Australia, we don’t have a right to free speech [act_tooltip title='(2)’ content=’Well, kinda. See this article.’].

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