Obo concludes his post on chuggers with this:
Everyone I know hates them. But really, they're just salesmen, doing a hard sell. They're no different from the guy knocking on your door with his "we're just in the area" double-glazing pitch. They're just salesman. And the product they're selling is a salved conscience.
Which gave me the opportunity to say something I've been meaning to say for ages in the comments:
As to chuggers, this is where the analogy with private business breaks down.
If you pay a salesman £20,000 and he drums up business with a net profit margin for you of £21,000, then he is worth employing. But to get your £21,000 net margin, the salesman has to make gross sales of £100,000 or £200,000 or whatever.
So the salesmen's total income is still only a small percentage of your total turnover or total costs.
Apply the same logic to charities, and you end up with the ludicrous situation that 90% of their gross income goes on fundraising (seeing as they are all scraping from the same barrel) because the profit margin from a donation IS the donation.
e.g. my sister once had one of these jobs, she said "As long as the donations I can get in are more than my salary plus overheads, then they will keep employing me".
So if that charity can employ ten people on £20,000 each (incl. overheads) and they manage to drum up £210,000 donations in total, the manager of that charity considers this to be a storming result. Actually it's complete and utter bollocks, and a massive destruction of wealth.
If we cut out the middleman, the business of these charities is actually creating employment opportunities for young people. They 'keep them off the streets' by giving them a bucket and a brightly coloured T-shirt and then, er, sending them back on to the streets.
So it would be far more honest for them to say that the actual purpose of the charity is to channel money to young people who have been frozen out of the jobs market (a worthy aim in itself), and that for every £1 you give them, they pass on 10p to another worthy cause (be that RSPCA, Friends of the Earth, Macmillans, whatever).
I'd probably be far more generous if they put it like that, because I do feel very bad about youth unemployment, tuition fees, high house prices and all that stuff.
No wonder he's never around
16 minutes ago
4 comments:
I suspect that the main business of the charities is funneling in enough money to pay for the exec offices and the 5 and six figure salaries of the office bearers, rather than any desire to provide life affirming opportunities tot he gullible oiks they inflict on us.
Mind you, given the market distortions and mayhem they inflict on the supposed 'beneficiaries' of their charity I suppose it is less destructive than their alleged role and purpose?
Ch fair point. Maybe they should say "For every £1 donated, 80p goes to young people who can't find a job; 10p goes to A Worthy Cause and 10p goes to a quangocrat"?
Unless it's a cmpaigning charity like Friends of the Earth, where 80p goes to young people and 20p to other staff, including over-renumerated senior executives.*
* I may be being unfair to FotE, who may be entirely administered by principled folk who earn barely more than the minimum wage, but somehow, I doubt it.
What I really dislike about chuggers is that they are trying to train the public to give out security-sensitive information to just anybody. If pressed, I always say I'll give them a signed direct debit form from my bank account if they give me one from theirs.
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