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IF YOU BUY A GOAT (or a plough or toilet block etc) as a charity gift at Christmas, how important is it to you that you buy a real, live, bleating one?
If it matters to you, then only four of the big catalogues we've found promise the real thing:
- The Good Gifts Catalogue [1]
- The Save the Children Wishlist [2]
- World Vision's Alternative Gift Catalogue [3]
- Help the Aged's Cows 'n' Things [4]
With these can you say with confidence that you have bought someone a goat.
If you don't care that much, there are many other catalogues that say they will buy, at best, nine-tenths of a goat (hopefully to add to lots of other nine-tenthses). But more likely they'll buy something completely different.
To make things clear: this is not the world of gifts. It's the competitive world of charity fundraising, where bending the truth seems par for the course - like advertising, only for a good cause.
Some charities are good at letting you know that X may morph into Z. The RNLI (see profile [4]) and RSPB (see profile [4]) in particular make no bones about it, and deserve some praise for their honesty.
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> Would you feel "misled" in this poll?
Poll shows that people feel 'misled' by many charity gifts
An opinion poll commissioned by the Charities Advisory Trust [5] and conducted by ICM has shown that 69 per cent of people feel "disgusted" that charities don't necessarily spend their money on the gifts described in their catalogues.
From the sample of over 1,000 people, 69 per cent felt "misled" by charities' clever wording. What's more, such behaviour made almost three-quarters feel "cautious" about giving to charities at all in the future.
We asked some of the charities mentioned here about this, but they said the survey didn't reflect the attitudes of their customers.
Whether or not that's true, even The Institute of Fundraising, to which many of them belong, says: "Charities ought to state clearly and prominently how funds will be used on marketing and recipient materials." This clarity and porominence is demonstrably in short supply.
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Oxfam (see profile [5]) is another matter. The front page of its Oxfam Unwrapped website features an alpaca sporting a large 'Buy me!' sticker. But it's only after a good poke around that it becomes clear how unlikely that purchase is. The only guarantee Oxfam makes is that 90 per cent of the money from its gifts will be spent on projects 'related' to them – which in the case of the alpaca can be any scheme 'designed to help people earn a living'. The remaining 10 per cent of total revenue can be spent on whatever it chooses.
Now giving money to Oxfam seems a good idea to us. But if you bought a kit to educate women about domestic violence, the money could be used instead to campaign against climate change. Or your HIV/AIDS awareness kit might turn into mosquito nets.
It's not what you bought for Christmas.
| > How the charity catalogues compare...
Your gift buys… what you think it does
- Good Gifts Catalogue
- Save the Children (see profile [5])
- Afghan Action [6] (for carpet-weavers)
- Help the Aged's (see profile [6]) Cows 'N' Things
- World Vision UK (see profile [6])
Your gift buys … something a bit like what you think it does (maybe)
- Oxfam (see profile [6])
- WWF (see profile [6]) Earthly Goods
- Send a Cow (see profile [6])
Your gift buys… whatever the charity feels like buying
- RSPCA (see profile [6])
- RNLI (see profile [6])
- SPANA (for animals abroad)
- SightSavers (see profile [6])
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Amid all this confusion are some organizations which work on simpler principles. As mentioned, The Good Gifts Catalogue [7] promises that the money from every gift it sells will be spent on what you intended, and it has an impressive set of contracts with the related charities to make sure.
Save the Children [8] (see profile [8]) is equally committed to making sure customers know what they're buying. After an experiment with a more ‘flexible' attitude last year, this year it returned to the what-you-buy-is-what-they-get model. Why? Because, they say, any other approach confuses people.
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> Beware of the goats
Send a goat, destroy a living?
Some conservationists think sending a goat is a very bad idea. They point out that the animals eat everything in sight, contributing to desertification and the wearing-out of land. "Grazing livestock is one of the main causes of third-world poverty," says John Burton, boss of the World Land Trust (WLT) (see profile [8]).
The WLT and Animal Aid are right to suggest that Oxfam’s gift scheme isn’t perfect. But press reports suggesting that ‘sending a goat’ will lead to wide-scale desertification are misleading.
The main problem with the Oxfam Unwrapped gift catalogue is its lack of transparency. As the WLT has pointed out, it’s almost impossible to tell what happens when you ‘buy a goat’. Though Oxfam says that it sends animals to places where they’re most needed, this isn’t something the customer can check.
Oxfam is a well-regarded charity, and has a history of responsible and considered development work. This makes us think that it probably won’t give goats to communities that can’t support them in the long term. But there’s no way of knowing that for sure.
If this worries you, you should buy gifts from a charity that guarantees to be able to track where your present is sent.
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The number of charity gift websites seems to increase by the week. So for new outfits not mentioned here, how can you tell where your money is going? Well, the best websites display their policy in big letters next to every gift they advertise, making the whole process clear. Lesser ones tuck the information out of sight. For the worst offenders, you'll have to give them a ring to find out what you're really buying.
> The Intelligent Giving Christmas Gift Awards 2006 [8]
> Our top ten charity Christmas cards [8]
> Our Watchdog articles [8]
> More Features [8]
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