Comment by jc01480 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jc01480 | Hacker News Reader

This same scheme applies to any “charity” that does not overtly state 100% of their proceeds are donated. And it’s not limited to law enforcement associations. Those commercials you see on TV about starving children, abused animals, suffering refugees, etc. are all complicit. What really happens: executive level and staff salaries are set at the market level for the association. All donations go to cover these “costs” throughout the year. Whatever is left over from these “costs” actually gets donated to their target group. The donations usually equal about 10% or less of their received funds. Correlate the executives that run these to other donation groups and you’ll see a pattern of people running them. Unless 100% of the proceeds go toward the target group is clearly communicated, all you’re doing is paying someone’s salary to run a feel-good effort that actually contributes very little to their target. And I’m a cop. Do your research.

Small, local charities usually have the greatest impact. And you can't pay an executive's salary in donated food or toiletries, so charities that run on practical items are great too.

> And you can't pay an executive's salary in donated food or toiletries, so charities that run on practical items are great too.

Except, you can probably pay an executive's salary AND buy more food and toiletries at wholesale rates with an equivalent cash donation.

https://www.npr.org/2011/11/22/142661882/a-case-for-cash-don...

That's true if people are going out and buying food to donate. But I think many times, people are donating food items that they overbought. Or bought on sale/clearance. Even bulk buys aren't always cheaper than a clearance sale trying to make shelf room for a product that will sell better.

There is obviously a need for money to buy in bulk the items that are needed. But if you can donate food that otherwise would go to waste and can be used locally as well, it's a win win.

But aren’t you buying those practical items through multiple middle men? Each pocketed something so it costs more? Doesn’t seem efficient. Even if you know the supply can only be donated and not paid to execs.

Yeah exactly. It may be the case that 100% of the canned goods you donate to the food bank finds its way into the hands of those who need it. It may also be the case that those canned goods have a lot of costs you're paying all throughout the supply chain. A can of chunky soup may cost $2 but what are you getting for that? Pennies worth of potatoes, carrots, and meat, fractions of a cent worth of spices, seasonings, salt, and other preservatives.

None of that matters at a local scale. Your local church running a food bank to support your neighbourhood wants practical grocery items that feed families in a dignified way.

Almost everyone who has canned food paid cash or equivalent for that canned food (most banks don't accept home-canned) which means they spent money on those cans. Unless you can buy a can for less than the shelter, its always better to give them the money you would have spent on the can, period. Even if you can buy it for less (you probably can't buy food for significantly less than a food shelter considering the discounts and relationships they have with vendors) money is still probably the better choice.

Why is it always better? Cans are all downside compared to cash. They take up space, they deprecate, they may not be what the shelter needs.

Shelters accept food for 2 reasons. 1) Many people see giving food as more "moral" or better than money because they believe the recipient does not deserve anything more than food and getting dented cans of corn is better than nothing. 2) Some people get offended if the shelter will not accept your donation so in interests of keeping donors happy.

TLDR; shelters take ragu sauce and canned creamed corn b/c that's what they can get, but it's about catering to social norms not supporting the needy.

There's a lot of numbers between 10% and 100%. A charity that donates 100% of the collected funds is one that only employs volunteers in their free time: I can understand they might not be the most efficient and effective. At the same time, a charity that uses 100% of it funds in administrative costs is simply a scam. There could be two solutions:

1) a law that mandates charities to display front and center the percentage of collected funds that went to charity in the previous year;

2) a hard cap on administration costs, maybe 1/3 of the collected funds.

Why are so many people under the delusion that money spent on salaries is “wasted”? A charity’s sole purpose doesn’t have to be to funnel raw cash to a target group.

If you’re running an animal shelter, who the hell is the money supposed to go to, the animals? Of course the money goes towards paying people to look after the animals. Money spent on those people’s salaries isn’t being “wasted” under any reasonable sense of the word.

For larger organizations, https://www.charitynavigator.org/ is great for this purpose. They don't handle local orgs, but it's still valuable.

As long as mentioning big projects like this, I'm a fan of givewell.org. Originally they just measured various charities effectiveness, though now they also offer to operate as a (fairly transparent) pass-through. I'm sure charity navigator is pretty good too, but I have vague memories of some issues that made me prefer GiveWell... if anyone else has anything more concrete to say for or against CharityNavigator, I'd be curious to have recollection refreshed/updated.

IIRC CN relies on judging expenses, whereas GW relies on effects. So while a charity on the former might be punished for having some percentage of 'overhead', it might be rated higher by the latter because its employees are more effective because they're not doing adminstrative work themselves, but instead leave that to eg secretaries.

As someone giving up my hard-earned dollars, effects are the only thing I care about.

Yeah, that's why I presume GGP preferred GiveWell.

I also think it might be good not to be too critical in general. As in, I don't care too much about overhead for most of my purchases, so if an organisation delivers a good amount of Good, then I'm not going to worry too much about whether it's the absolute most they can do. It's not like I donate that significant a part of my income anyway.

I think we're saying the same thing. I don't care about "overhead" at all. It matters not to me how much Tim Cook gets paid or how much Apple wastes on marketing--I only care about whether the iPhone I buy is better bang for my buck than the alternatives.

It's exactly the same for charity giving. (Perhaps more so for me, since my contributions cut into my living expenses in a noticeable way.)

Oh yeah, I didn't mean to disagree, only to add on to what you said :)

off topic, but how did you find your way to HN? Are you also in IT/engineering? A hobbyist? Just like the discussion?

I never expected to see any cops browsing HN, pretty cool!

It strikes me as incredibly psychopathic on the part of the operators to run charity scams like this. How do they justify it to themselves?

Do other countries suffer similarly with fake self-serving charities like the US does?

> How do they justify it to themselves?

By looking at their bank accounts.

> Do other countries suffer similarly with fake self-serving charities like the US does?

Not quite, robocalling is much less common, as are easy ways to figure out who is a likely donor.

A very good effort in this domain is Givewell, their own transparency report is a good example of how it should be done and their information is usually of very high quality:

https://www.givewell.org/

https://www.givewell.org/about/our-mistakes

Oh my goodness it's so much worse in most of the world.

The upside of being a psychopath is that you don't have to justify it to yourself; you sleep well as long as your belly is full. The downside is the amount of effort required to maintain a false persona that is persuasive to others. Smarter psychopaths don't get too hung up on that, instead finding less smart or well-resourced psychopaths willing to perform that work on their behalf, eg think of a cult leader who rarely appears in public or only issues bland truisms, and whose adherents maintain the reputation of the leader sufficiently carefully to assure a sufficient supply of new recruits, but not more than the cult organization can absorb without losing status or cohesion.

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