No funny business with Comic Relief

Adam Rothwell
  Adam Rothwell
Features Editor, Intelligent Giving

Our first celeb endorsement. Almost NOT ALL CHARITY APPEALS get our vote. Some don’t think too hard about who they give their money to. Others don’t check the money has been used properly. Others send out confusing messages about admin costs.

But Comic Relief (read profile) doesn’t seem to commit any of these sins. Our research shows that you can happily jump in a bath of jelly, knowing that:
  1. Comic Relief gives grants to un-sexy charities - and does so with care. Most of the money goes to carefully chosen, small, less popular charities (for example, ones helping asylum seekers and mentally ill people). These are hard to identify without in-depth knowledge. Giving to Comic Relief is like getting expert advice on charities, only for no effort or cost.
  2. It will usually sit on your money for over a year – but in a good way. Many grants are drip-fed over several years – so at any one time, there’s a lot of cash in the bank. Usually we don’t like this sort of behaviour, but it’s a good way of making sure that the receiving charities do what they say with the money. Because if they don’t, they don’t get any more.
  3. They seem honest... In their annual report the bigwigs at Comic Relief admit mistakes (most charities don’t), and talk about learning from them. They’re also good at setting targets and meeting them.
  4. ...But they could try harder. The annual report doesn’t give evidence that the money is well spent. But in private it analyses all sorts of data and it commissions reports to monitor the work. The charity’s head of grants, Judith McNeill, tells us that it keeps this information under wraps because there’s never been demand for it before – but says that she'll be making it public before long.
  5. It benefits all charities. We’ve heard that immediately after Red Nose Day, all charitable giving goes up. An afterglow effect, apparently. Hurray.
  6. It makes us laugh. And how many charities manage that?
> Our profile of Comic Relief
> Watchdog articles
> More features


Email this page
Print this page

Reader's comments

Donor control
Submitted by cameronweaver on Thu, 08/03/2007 - 10:49am.

Sarah raises another valid point here that IG hasn't yet answered - i.e. that grant-givers per se can be seen as a bad thing because donors lose control of where their money is going when they give to one.  The more I think about this, the more it looks like Mr Rothwell happens just to like Comic Relief, and happens just not to like Children in Need.  Administrative problems notwithstanding, they're almost identical, aren't they?  I await a response with baited breath.


Let's be clear about one thing
Submitted by SSE on Wed, 07/03/2007 - 3:17pm.

It doesn't make me laugh. Cry

Why not ask if any of the comedians get paid an "honorarium" a la Terry?


Wogan envy?
Submitted by Sarah on Wed, 07/03/2007 - 3:04pm.

Another point about Comic Relief that you've failed to highlight is the possibility of donations being used to support causes that the donor doesn't agree with. I realise this is a problem applicable to many grant-giving organisations. However, you came down hard on poor Pudsey about it: why not Comic Relief? Was your campaign against CIN simply a thinly veiled envy-driven attack on the lovely, cuddly Terry Wogan?


Cameron's Comic Relief
Submitted by Adam Rothwell on Tue, 06/03/2007 - 11:15am.

Cameron raises some good points here, but we're not about to throw in the towel just yet. 

As we report elsehwere on this site (see the blog), CIN falls short of Comic Relief in several key areas.  Although on some basic points there is inevitably overlap between the two appeals, we're confident in stating that Comic Relief is the better of the two.

Most important, perhaps, is Comic Relief's attitude towards transparency.  Whereas CIN and the BBC had to be pressured by the Information Commissioner to divulge details of their TV appeal, Comic Relief is much keener to share its information, and doesn't give the impression of wanting to keep key facts back. In addition, when it came to proving its transparency in a key legal document, CIN gave the impression of not really being bothered with something so apparently unimportant - something emphatically not the case at Comic Relief.

I could go on - and talk about the awful CIN claim that 'every penny raised' goes towards helping vulnerable children, for example - but I'll probably just send everyone to sleep. Suffice it to say that Children in Need and Comic Relief are very different charitable beasts indeed.

Adam, Intelligent Giving


Comic Relief
Submitted by cameronweaver on Tue, 06/03/2007 - 11:03am.

It's clear that IG likes Comic Relief. But it's not clear why. A lot of the reasons they give in this article equally apply to Children in Need - the target of a pre-emptive strike by IG last year. For example, CIN will also 'sit on your money' for over a year, and for the same reasons as Comic Relief; and CIN additionally gives out a lot of cash to un-sexy causes - and does so carefully - as well.  As far as I know, CIN's appeal might boost overall giving with an 'afterglow effect', and, personally, I think a lot of the Pudsey stuff is also quite funny.

Where does this leave IG's argument?  Well, frankly nowhere. Seeing as Comic Relief and CIN get roughly the same score in their profiles on this site, Mr Rothwell's argument collapses.  None of his points actually hold up to criticism.  Has anyone got any thoughts on this?  


Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.