Children in need probably do give to NSPCC. To find out if they do, or how much, check the accounts of either.
However, few funders (and CiN is a funder) will cover everything a charity needs. Often grants cover at best a single project, often only part of a project and not covering anything else.

Funny really, charities need money to cover everyday things like electricity, gas, rent, phone bill, salaries etc.
The £2 a month (which is only a start, individuals can be asked later to increase it) will help pay for the background costs as well as campaigning and direct action.

CiN give to many charities, but cannot afford to totally support the large ones.

I have a further comment

Children in need are attracting millions of pounds

Why do the NSPCC still have to beg for a £2 a month donation?

Do Children in need give aid to NSPCC

BBC News: "In a segment called Raven: The Island in the BBC's Children in Need appeal's Scotland broadcast in 2005, viewers were led to believe that a phone-in competition, open to the audience, had been won by a viewer. In fact, due to a technical mistake, calls from the public did not get through and the name of a fictitious winner was read out on air."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6905095.stm
How did you miss that one IG? ;)

adam rothwell contradicts himself, he complains that they do not do cover their administrative duties, then he says they spend too much on admin.

We *want* to raise the profile of good, smaller charities but the big problem is: which criteria do we use to choose them? We get enough grief as it is for our criteria for choosing the larger charities, and we thought they were pretty watertight. Selecting small charities arbitrarily is not feasible. We'd love people's suggestions for criteria :non-existent shoulder-shrug emoticon:

http://society.guardian.co.uk/voluntary/story/0,,1952787,00.html

(Good publicity for IG)

So when you guys going to review some of the smaller (but still "of general interest") charities then? :non-existent angel emoticon: - not necessarily the very locally-focussed or obscure disease ones, but there are many others that do good work which could be of wider interest

--------------------------------------------------------------
... they nearly thought I am Vlad the Impaler

The figures Intelligent Giving gleaned from Children in Need's annual report and other filings indicate an annual income of £37,163,025 and admin costs of £1,869,890.

If CIN kept donations for an average of six months then it would have to be getting an interest rate of around 10 percent to cover the admin costs, which is about double the best rate I can get.

Am I missing something here?

Peter Heywood, Intelligent Giving

I agree with you Neldo that Adam's argument that his grant-giving charity is different to CiN is correct. That was not my contention. What I said is that he didn't make that differentiation between government and public funded in his article, merely saying that in 90% of cases giving to grant-giving charities is a 'lazy donation', whilst giving no yardstick to judge which 10% qualify as an example of 'intelligent giving'. Now, it would appear that the organisation that funds this website is to be considered intelligent giving as it is mostly government funded (they don't seem to be turning down public donations either). However, I say again, the article in question did not say that government funded ones were ok, it rather made a very sweeping statement that giving to grant-giving charities was on the whole bad. I was warning against the possible oversimplification of the message, and you can tell me till you're blue in the face that the institution funding this is different to CiN, but according to the article, under which we are only given 'grant-giving' vs 'non-grant giving' as a variable, they are the same. Their differences, and the significance of these differences which are not mentioned in the article in fact prove my argument, so I suggest that it is you who may not have been listening.

In response to Neldo - it's all in the wording.

I put my foot down with a *very* firm hand on our "100% of donor money goes to projects" statement. Whenever I issue such a statement, it reads "As our original endowment covers our administrative overheads, we can guarantee that 100% of your money will go to projects". Project-specific administration is included in project costs - i.e. any office-y stuff that would not happen if it was not for that particular project (as opposed to overall management, administrative, accounting or fundraising costs, which are paid for by the original endowment not donor money).

As explained elsewhere on this site, some charities bank donors' money and pay admin overheads out of the interest earned before that money is paid out - which means that they can promise that the original donation will go entirely to the project.

However, I strongly believe that such things should be clarified as too many people have a false impression that what businesses have to pay for, charities get for free. I wish. I hate statements which imply that charities have no costs with a passion.

Am truly delighted that www.cavyrescue.co.uk will be able to stop my arthritic gerbil getting any worse; I presume that profiling this charity is a high priority task for Intelligent Giving?

Also, thought you'd like to know that having spent a few hours nosing about your website, I *finally* got around to setting up a direct debit for the CF Trust (www.cftrust.org.uk), which I've been meaning to do for years - and albeit indirectly you spurred me on to doing it. So 1-0 to you. (Though they don't yet have a profile - are they going to be done before or after the gerbils? Those tricky decisions you face...)

Thanks for all the info.

If, as Adam points out, the grant-giver that supports this website is wholly funded by government then it receives no donations from the public and is therefore a very different case to that of CiN.

Also, I fail to see how any organisation, grant-giving or otherwise, can make the promise that every penny donated goes to charity, as there must always be administration costs. As far as I can see it is only clever accounting and misrepresentation. For organisations that are wholly funded by voluntary donations, it is simply impossible. Somewhere along the line, somebody's money had to be used to cover the costs of running the charity.

I am indeed interested in charities, but I do not see grant-giving institutions in such a harsh light. They may also seek to regain their admin costs from government or benefactors, the same as the organisation that funds you, and this is the kind of differentiation you must make when giving such a widespread criticism. Some grant-giving organisations may be able to keep the promise of every penny donated going to the cause, that you consider CIN to not have delivered. Without making that kind of differentiation, the charity that attributes you grants is as bad as CIN (aside from their documentation record) and a donation to them should also be considered 'lazy'. This is exactly what I meant when I referred to the potential to oversimplify your message.

Also, your point about grant-giving organisations holding on to money for up to 6 months seems a little alarmist. Charities are not seeking to make a profit, and quite frequently in terms of grant-giving, a staggered distribution of donations is most prudent and effective. If you give a 10 year project all the money in one go and it falls flat on its face then that money is lost. If it is given in installments then progress can be monitored and risk of wasting money is less.

Not all donations to grant-givers are bad. But most are.

If you give to one of these charities, you lose control of where your money goes and you incur extra admin costs.

These are uncontroversial facts, and, as far as I'm aware, can't be argued with.

This means that, for the conscientious giver, there are almost always more effective ways to give.

But this doesn't mean that we think grant-givers are bad per se.

If you can't be bothered or don't have the time to make decisions about which charities to give to, then grant-givers can be very useful. We just think that, if you're on this site, then you're probably interested in charities, and so could do better.

And what about our own funding from a grant-giver? Well, that's a clever point, but it doesn't really apply here.

There's a big difference between grant-givers that solicit cash from the public, and grant-givers that distribute money given by a benefactor or government agency.

And the grant funding we get comes, in one way or another, from the government, which has to use intermediary agencies in order to make sure its cash is distributed fairly - which, in this case, I think it has been!

Adam Rothwell

Whilst I accept Adam Rothwell's points that Children in Need should have been better about it's reporting and in general more transparent about its donations, I would think he might have exercised more caution in so blanketedly criticising grant-giving charities. Whilst there is that small link mentioning one grant-giving charity which is approved of, this kind of ubiquitous criticism could be really harmful, particularly if over-simplified and taken out of context, by say the Daily Mail in today's paper. I certainly wouldn't imagine that Mr Rothwell meant that all donations to grant giving charities are lazy giving, in particular the local grant-giving charity that funds this website.

So gerbils want your cash - all very well and good. But surely there should be a law against totally pointless charities like this? Why doesn't the Charity Commission stop this nonsense?

And, more to the point, why didn't they notice such big errors with CIN's dodgy accounts?? What's wrong with them!

I couldn't believe that this was a real charity but having searched the charity commission I find that IT IS!!!

http://www.cavyrescue.co.uk will, of course.

Thanks Adam - I take your point. To the main question, then: How can I best help arthritic gerbils? All that time, running in wheels...it makes your heart break.
Toby

I think you've got some good points there, jtlross. However, the errors CIN makes in its Summary Information Return are more serious than you suggest - even though it's true that few people read these things. CIN has a legal requirement to complete this document to the best of its ability, and its board of trustees has a duty to check over its contents and ensure their truthfulness. It's not clear that CIN did either of those things - which is why we take them to task for it. We're not saying all charities have to be perfect - but we do think all charities should obey the rules.

I'd also accept that, if you give to any national charity, then your money will be spread across the country. However, the point I wanted to make was that, in the case of CIN, you don't really know where your cash is going at all - so it could even support a cause you don't approve of, like helping asylum seekers, or providing family mediation in a form not compatible with your personal faith.

And as for your final point, I'd totally agree: if you're lazy, give to Pudsey. But if you've got a bit more energy - which is what I assume if you've made it this far - then there are far better options out there.

And if you want to give to arthritic gerbils, then we'd say: Fine, do that. It's your money - so you should control where it goes.

Adam Rothwell

Hmm. I was never too keen on the one-eyed teddy thing in the first place (maybe it was just Sir Terry putting me off?), but I feel strengthened in my prejudice now. And obviously it would be great if they were well-staffed enough to do their reporting properly. But (and this might be controversial) I'd far rather a charity I gave money on really focused on distributing my money than duplicating paperwork that barely anyone really reads, if they were genuinely understaffed. And fingers-crossed they'll do a better job next year.

The bigger problem I have is with your parochialism: if you're giving to a charity, does it really matter whether they're going to spend it in 'Gateshead' or 'Guildford'? If I give money to Mind, I don't panic that they might help someone with a mental illness who happens to live in an affluent town. And charities ALWAYS act as filters/intermediators, to help you achieve a greater benefit from the money you'd like to give towards helping people. Complaining that you don't have any control over where the money goes seems a bit bogus to me. Maybe CIN will spend it better than I would if I donated it to the particular cause of my fancy (eg. arthritic gerbils?). Obviously some more accountability would help, but I don't think you should slag it off so much as a way of giving; if people aren't entirely sure about the specific ends they'd like to achieve with their donation, then it might well be a good option.

I've got a lot of sympathy with Cameron's views on this, but it's also true to say that, if you CAN be bothered to make a choice about which children's charity to give to, then (it seems to me) that you should steer well clear of Children in Need. I'd rather not waste my money - though other, less informed people, might keep on so doing.

So I get the message: CIN is run by a collection of lazy managers who don't care about what the public think. But can this really be true? Surely the organization encourages a lot of people to give each year who normally wouldn't - so in spite of the (admittedly valid) criticisms Adam comes up with here, there *is* some good in the old ted yet.

Noggers, I have to agree. There was an article in the Observer last Sunday bashing CIN about their weird claim to have no admin costs - but this takes things a step further. I think it's time for the Beeb to adopt the same level of self-criticism for CIN as they normally show when covering other controversial work. The deference they show at the moment is just pathetic.

What are these jokers playing at? If it's the law to submit two documents to the government then the dimwits at Children in Need should get their act together and Do It. If the people responsible for this cockup worked anywhere other than in a cosseted charity, then they would be out the door. This is almost unbelievable stuff, and just shows why charities sometimes need to realise they're responsible for large sums of money, and ought to behave responsibly with it.