Disaster porn

Some sensational stories scooped off the latest issue of a free magazine:

• The real reason for 2004's 'swarm of locusts drought' in Niger was high food prices caused by suppliers defaulting on deliveries.
• Cheap air travel made disaster relief harder, not easier, after the Tsunami.
• Well-organised radio stations are more effective then conventional aid in most natural disasters.
• Smoke from cooking fires is the fourth greatest cause of death/disease in the Third World.

The magazine is the UK government's surprisingly candid and interesting Developments (quarterly, free subscription).

Earthquake wizardry

The silver lining in Yogyakarta is that the area is already well served by charities helping out at the nearby Mt Merapi volcano (satellite map showing how close they are) and those doing tsunami reconstruction on neighbouring Sumatra.

The UN's ReliefWeb is the site to watch in these situations. It already carries yesterday's Situation Report which lists the national and international responses. Examples of what the commercial news reports are missing:

• The Indonesian Department of Social Affairs already has tents and field kitchens in place.
• Medical staff from UK charity Merlin appear to have moved fastest, having already flown to the area on commercial flights.
• There's already been a meeting of 23 international organisations (at the Aceh centre) to co-ordinate the response.
• The Red Cross, Red Crescent, Islamic Relief and Merlin are flying in two tonnes of medical supplies this afternoon.
• A large multi-agency mission with the usual suspects (World Health Organisation, UN, World Food Programme, CARE) are driving to the city today.

Click here for a list of the charities already there

Charities: the new religion?

Amnesty International was created at a time when religion and socialism were dying - and it took the place of both, according to a new book.

Amnesty founder Peter Benenson said the purpose of Amnesty was to "rekindle a fire in the minds of men (sic). It is to give him, who feels cut off from God a sense of belonging to something greater than himself, of being a small part of the entire human race."

Methinks this concept will strike a chord for many charity (not just Amnesty) enthusiasts.

The book is called "Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International". It's a tough, cerebral read, but the fact that the author spent a year inside Amnesty makes it compelling, whether or not you grasp all that thinking. Will he or won't he join Amnesty at the end of his combobulations? Read a (non-revelatory) overview here.

High-minded Bristol

Residents of Abingdon searched most on the Tsunami

Bletchley is the town that wants to know a lot about "charity"
Wakefield is most interested in the "Charity Commission" (are they sure?)
Glasgow is the city that most wants to "volunteer"
Portsmouth really wants to "give time"
Bristol most wants to "donate"
Thames Ditton wants to "give money" but then it also most wants to "make a million" (are the two facts connected?)

Which brings us to Farnborough which most wants to "get rich" and Croydon which desperately wants to "make money".

The stats from new search plaything Google Trends are probably meaningless but they're great fodder for time-pressed bloggers.

Big Brother's accounts

10p of every vote cast during Big Brother (note for non-tabloid readers: a new series has started) will be divided between three charities: Shelter, Teenage Cancer Trust and a third to be chosen by the fruitcake who wins.

In the last series 15 million votes were cast. If Channel 4's ratings keep their form that's a £1.5m charity jackpot: a shot in the arm for Cancer Teenage Trust's yearly income of £4.4m and welcome pocket money for Shelter (£42m).

These are household name charities and popular causes. There are 160,000 other charities to choose from, some far harder to fund than others. I'm just curious: can anyone tell me how Channel 4 chose those two?

Forgive my gratuitous search engine scamming while I list all the Big Brother contestants to see if they bring in more visitors: Grace, Richard, Bonnie, Pete, George, Shahbaz, Mikey, Lea, Imogen, Dawn, Glyn, Lisa, Sezer, Nicki. In da house! Davina McCall, Dermot O'Leary, Russell Brand, you rock! (That's more than enough - Ed)

Cyclists vs Motorists

Don't worry, this is not that old debate (the problem is bad drivers, two-wheeled or four). But let me tell you how I nearly died a couple of weeks ago, and what I learned from the incident.

One moment while I mount the pulpit.

One morning, a motorist in a hurry came within inches of pancaking me onto my pushbike. System 1 kicked in but thankfully I couldn't catch up with him to swear even louder.

After I reached the safety of the cycle towpath and the calming sight of waterfowl and bulrushes, I pedalled my way to a more sensible response:

I concluded that the fundamental problem here in London is that cyclists and motorists are constantly funnelled into the same tiny spaces. Blame medieval road planners. The solution is cycle lanes, real ones that physically keep bikes and cars apart. I don't know how to build or lobby for them. So when I got in that day I looked for people who do.

"Cycle lane" and "cycle path" produced duff results at Guidestar's charity listings but Google came up with the goods: Sustrans - the people responsible for the National Cycle Network - and the London Cycling Campaign (LCC).

The LCC website offered their plans for the future, up to 2008, and I liked what I saw, while I couldn't easily find what Sustrans was planning* (a mystifyingly familiar scenario on charity sites) - but I did see that they had clout and results. And neither seemed to be sitting on too much money or blowing too much on admin, fundraising or salaries (I'll write an entry eventually on how to spot this).

The result: 60% of my cycling safety fund will be going to LCC, 40% to Sustrans. Satisfaction. Karma.

*Their website is now bursting with plans about the Olympics so they are forgiven

Beating lifeboats into missiles

The RNLI is one of "the most persistent charity holders of arms investments" according to the Campaign Against Arms Trade. I suppose if you're sitting on £378m you've a duty to spread your investments (including to Rolls Royce whose Hawk jet fighters sell so well in the developing world).

The Leukemia Research Fund is the other persistent one. It has a £1.3m stake in Smiths Group (trigger systems for Israeli attack helicopters).

Cancer Research UK has just withdrawn its 30,000 shares in BAe Systems (cluster bombs). Bless its cotton socks.

Funny old world. More from CAAT.

Friday Monday rant

An email I just received from Monday says, again: "And five times more out of every pound goes to charity than the National Lottery."

That's as good as a lie. And I think any jury would agree. Hope so.

The fact is that 28.5p per pound goes to 70 large charities in the first year (Monday's stated 30p really is a lie - how fun) rather than the National Lottery's 28p per pound going to thousands of mostly small non-profits.

And can people stop plumping up the feathers of Monday's MD Craig Freeman by calling him a social entrepreneur? Anyone who says, "There was no lottery here until 1994 so there was all this pent-up demand" is not a social entrepreneur. Social entrepreneurs work to help society, not to secure shares for the board worth £3.4m, share options worth a further £5.2m, or a £1m company bonus scheme and employee incentive plan.

Best overview is in The Guardian. More in the Indy. Even more at the Fundraising Technology blog.

Trustees: the basics

(aka "Why it's very hard for a trustee to be a fraud")

Nothing clever-clever here. Just an overview of trustees for those who don't quite understand what they are about. So to begin:

Charity trustees are the equivalent of company directors, but with one main difference: they get paid nowt except for the expenses of attending meetings.

So there's nothing in it for them except doing good, networking and being seen to do good.

• As with directors, they are collectively called a board.
• Also like directors, they meet a few times a year to help make strategic decisions about the charity.
• Chief Executives are the ones who actually run charities and they normally are *not* trustees and therefore *are* normally paid. They keep the board up to date with what is going on and try to persuade it that what they are doing is right.
• Significantly, trustees usually have to leave after two or three years to bring in fresh blood and they, or charity members, vote for their replacements.
• An effective board will usually contain no more than 12 trustees, most of whom care deeply about the charity and have a range of experience.
• Larger boards can have problems reaching consensus but, equally, any size of board will be ineffective if it has limited passion or competance.
• A patron, incidentally, is not a legal term. A patron is someone who has agreed to be called a patron.

That covers it. Charities generally have a hard time finding trustees so if you fancy offering your services, visit TrusteeBank. If you're a trustee please give us your opinions via the Comment link below.

Beating the charity ratings

NEW YORK (Reuters) - An executive at a heart disease charitable foundation who embezzled close to a quarter of a million dollars over two years to pay a dominatrix to beat him was sentenced on Tuesday to two to six years in prison. More..

Ho ho.

Curiously enough it was this kind of scenario that sparked off the creation of the US' top charity ranking web site. A wealthy individual learned that his donations to a charity were being using to put the CEO's kids through college (more honourable, I grant you, than paying to be spanked). He promptly pulled the charitable giving and created an organisation that ranked charities by their finances: Charity Navigator.

I like Charity Navigator because it comforts you that donations are being used as promised. However I don't like the stress on the finances at the expense of details around planning and outcomes. Someone summed up the problem: "Judging a charity by its finances is like judging a wine by the number of grapes you put in it."

The academically-minded might enjoy this PDF comparison of Charity Navigator and similar sites.

National Lottery vs Monday

The UK now has two charity-associated lotteries: the National Lottery and funky new upstart, Monday.

First things first: as a punter, you are far more likely to win a prize with Monday. More info

As far as the charitable side goes, here's how they compare:

	National Lottery	Monday
Amount to recipients:	28p per £1	30p per £1*
Potential recipients:	Over 100,000 non-profit bodies	70 well-known charities
Punter chooses recipients:	No	Yes
Recipients prioritised by:	Social need, as defined by a board made up of voluntary sector workers, seasoned with government pressure	Their agreement to pay 5% of their income to help market Monday in its first year
Charity Blogger's take:	A necessary evil supporting countless smaller non-profits	Yet more money siphoned off to the big boys

*Monday says it sends five times more to charities, as percentage of takings, than the National Lottery. True but utterly misleading: it's based on the fact that the National Lottery helps many non-profit organisations that aren't registered charities. You wonder what other egregious facts they have up their sleeve.

Useful links
How the National Lottery money is spent - by area/date
How the PlayMonday money will be spent
"It belongs to the England of Hogarth and Gillray, of Gin Lane..."