Yet Another Hero with Feet of Clay

I thought the new generation web-based charities which let donors connect with specific recipients was a wonderful idea. It was depressing to discover that this was just another "misrepresentation" (scam?). It ends up the stories are canned and represent cases from the file and not your specific recipient. Here's a bit from a NY Times article by Stephanie Strom:

“There’s a whole new generation of socially connected nonprofits that use the Internet to make the illusion of person-to-person contact much more believable,” said Timothy Ogden, editor in chief of Philanthropy Action, an online journal for donors. “The problem is that they are no more connecting donors to people than the child sponsorship organizations of the past did.”

In the late 1990s, several child sponsorship organizations amended their disclosures after a series of articles in The Chicago Tribune revealed that while they were soliciting money to sponsor a specific needy child, that child was not necessarily receiving the money directly.

More recently, charities that ask donors for money to buy a farm animal have added disclaimers to their pitches, stating that money might not buy a cow or a duck but finance broader programs.

I "kinda" knew that those "adopt an orphan" adds that blanket the TV are phony. But it is disheartening to learn that the web-based charities that claim to connect you as a donor to a specific recipient are "misleading".

I knew that from marketing studies that if you personalize some tragedy people open up their wallets. I figured the adopt-a-child pitches on TV were using this technique to fatten their revenues. Plus, I knew that the charities sold their names to marketing companies that did the pitch. So it was in the interest of the charity advertises to milk you for every penny.

But I was naive in thinking that the new web-based charities based on micro-finance were "different". But, alas, they aren't. They are in the business of getting money from you. How much is hived off for "administration" and whether there is the blatant selling of names to marketing companies is less clear, but from reading the NY Times article, it is clear that this "new generation" of charity is quickly going down that well-worn path. Sad.

The article points out that organizations like Kiva play a dubious role:

Mr. Ogden goes so far as to question Kiva’s role in the lending process. “Kiva’s new documentation explains, if you read it, that Kiva is a connector not of individual lenders to individual donors, but of individual lenders to microfinance institutions,” he said. “If Kiva’s users want to be connected to an individual borrower, Kiva doesn’t do that, and so the big question is, do Kiva’s users want to be connected to a microfinance institution — in which case, why do they need Kiva?”

Indeed, individual lenders can support microfinance institutions directly through, for example, Microplace, or make donations to support nonprofit groups like the Grameen Foundation and Acción that support microfinance.

Alas... my idealism is disillusioned yet again.