I get quite annoyed by these charity people who approach me in the street for money. The problem is they won't take a donation for cash, but insist that you sign up with them for a number of months. £6 a month or whatever, it varies depending upon the charity. I spoke to one of them in a small midlands town today who worked for Save the Children, a United Nations organised charity.
Ziad, the street fundraiser (as his job is entitled) in Nuneaton, told me that he was paid a wage to come out onto the streets for five days a week. If he seals a contract he is paid some commission. He travels daily with a colleague from town to town. Yesterday he was in Northampton, tomorrow Birmingham. I suggested he had a hard sell because whereas people would be quite happy to offer a pound or a two pound coin on impulse, they did not want to make a big commitment to sign up to a monthly donation. He agreed but said that his charity was better than many who sign people up with a text message through 02 – who take about a proportion of the deal. He said as soon as someone signs up on his Ipad then no money is lost and all of it goes to charity.
I suggested cynically that the fund-raising campaign favoured contracts over collecting tins because it removed the risk of theft at street level. A digital transaction stops petty pilfering.
A question that comes to mind is why do the United Nations need to send people on to the streets when they have enormous amounts of tax paid into their coffers from the countries of the world – surely a proportion of that is directed at saving children? Somehow all that money doesn't appear to be doing a great deal of good considering, for example, the amount of child refugees in UN supported war zones. It worries me that an enormous organisation like the United Nations suddenly has access to people's bank accounts, people who have enough money to donate monthly to charity, especially considering that most of the elite's global banks are bust. I hope a high degree of compliance is going on here.
The gullible public really have no specific idea of where all this money goes and how it's divided. Even though this info may be available on web sites it would be good if this information was lauded on news bulletins and programmes with high viewing ratings so that we could all become little auditors. This would give these charities more credibility and obviously raise more money.