Whats wrong with Pudsey?? we have an imposter on our TV's tonight!!! Please bring Pudsey back!! they could have made a cartoon out of him with his old bandage back!! and 50K to make a cartoon is just ridiculous!! Surely this money would have been much better spent elsewhere!!!

Well, the annual report might be better, but I notice that the adverts (oh, all right, "trailers") for this year's CiN are one again repeating the misleading claim that "every single penny" raised last year went to help disadvantaged children.

Surely they could have got a volunteer to do as good a job for nothing?  Had a schools competition with a laptop as a prize or something? It's questionable whether the actual design of the bear will encourage people to give more.  It's more the marketing of the idea by the media which gets people's attention.  What else did they get for the £50K?  The whole Pudsey concept is so unremarkable that I spelt his name wrong on the last header and I am not usually that unobservant.  £50K would have kept a good few kids warm this winter.

I take your point, Charis - and it is a bit disgusting that it costs that much - but surely if it brings in more cash in the end, then it's justified? And I think it probably will. The old Pudsey really was extraordinarily naff, too...

£50,000 to make a cartoon of the original bear, who now looks like he is wearing his pants on his head.  Who is laughing all the way to the bank? 

Enjoying this conversation. Holden, I'm not sure in the UK we *can* rely on large and well-entrenched grant-givers to systematically assess their impact... But in answer to your question, yes Children in Need does appear to have sufficient transparency and results for the layperson to make a basic appraisal (and that's what our ratings are all about).

mikemuses: good question. Here are some thoughts ...

My basic take on personal relationships is that if you have them, you should use them; if you don't, you need something else.

I think a grantmaker can be judged on:

1. Track record. Someone like Children in Need is huge and has been around for a while. They should be systematically evaluating the impact of their grants, and they should be able to present a strong case of their own that they can carry out successful projects and help people.

2. Reasoning/intelligence. Grantmakers should be totally transparent about how their decisions are made. If you have the time, you can spot-check and decide for yourself how reasonable they are. If you don't, maybe someone you know does. Either way, assessing this is (or should be) much easier and more doable than assessing the work of an individual charity.

Does Children in Need actually have the transparency or the results needed to assess them in this way? That I can't answer.

so how do you judge a good grantmaker?  personal connection?

I want to add that I know the situation is not as black and white as my last post makes it sound.

The idea of using a professional all depends on the quality of the professional, and I believe that a lot of large grantmakers, possibly including Pudsey, are just using personal connections and arbitrary ratios anyway and add no value. I've left that question aside and assume we're talking about a good grantmaker (which IG seems to think Pudsey qualifies as).

And, if you happen to know someone whom you personally believe in and trust, investing in them can make more sense than going through a grantmaker.

It's when you don't already know someone good - and many donors do not - that the suggestion to "go do your own research" (whether on the Internet or by forming a relationship with whoever happens to be down the block) becomes unreasonable. At that point, if you can find a good grantmaker, that's the responsible move, and heading down to your local soup kitchen so you can see it up close is the lazy move.

Forming a personal connection allows you to get to know ONE charity. If you have totally crazy amounts of time on your hands, you might be able to get up to 2 this way, or (if you're retired) 3-4.

Which charity would you bet on: the one you chose by evaluating 1-4 charities up close, or by evaluating 2000 charities from afar?

I believe that helping people - truly changing their lives - is extremely difficult. I'm not even sure how much being up close helps, because it isn't how they behave while clients that matters, it's what happens to them afterward - and that's the kind of evaluation that a behemoth is more capable of anyway. It seems to me that the "personal connection" idea favors good fundraisers (as cameronweaver stated) and is not going to get your money to the best place at all.

Of course, there is an advantage: personal satisfaction of seeing your work up close. So really, the tradeoff is as follows. Get up close and personal, and help people less effectively, but feel more satisfied doing it. Entrust your decision to a grantmaker, and sacrifice your personal fuzzy feelings to do a better job helping people.

Now which one is the lazy option?

I like Holden's take on this issue. Of course, it's true that finding a really 'good' charity can seem like an impossible task; and it is, of course, a professional's job to come to a solid conclusion on this issue.

However, I also have a lot of sympathy for Hugo's point of view. The idea that choosing a charity to support is more than a purely rational decision - and that it might encompass a range of means of support, such as giving money and volunteering - is, I think, a reasonable and widely held point of view.

Ultimately, I think the truth lies somewhere between these two posts. Yes, in an ideal world, choosing a charity is something that can best be done by a professional. In reality, however, people choose causes to support often because they have a personal connection to them; they want to build up a personal relationship with their chosen charity. 

I think this donor-charity relationship can be productive - something which could lend support to the idea that giving to Children in Need is 'lazy' and 'inefficient', since it appears to encourage single donations at the expense of long-term support. 

On the other hand, however, it's charities which have the best fundraising teams that tend to be those which cultivate the best relationships with their donors - and just because they employ good fundraisers doesn't mean a charity is actually doing good work.

My head is spinning... 

Surely the point that's missing here, "US bloke", is: you can find one, single charity yourself, ideally a local one, and track and support it (maybe even volunteer for it). Then you avoid the doubled-up admin costs and you have the huge satisfaction of seeing your money work before your eyes. And no matter how good those "professional" grant-makers are, they'll never have the same amount of insight into any of the charities they fund. And by the way, as all small charities know, their criteria are often arbitrary and nonsensical.

"So if you don't have the time or the inclination to attempt that work yourself ..."

Who has the time to do that work themselves? Or even the ability? Helping people is a complex and difficult endeavor, and getting substantive information on hundreds of charities - to say nothing of sorting through it - is not a realistic thing for an individual donor to do.

That's why it makes sense to pay professionals for it, just as we do for anything else in our lives that's this complex. Your insistence that paying for this difficult and important work is "pissing money away" reinforces the ridiculous fallacy that overhead = waste. We don't hold any other kind of business to this standard.

I'm a US bloke, and I have no idea whether these Pudsey people are any good at what they do. But if they are - smart grantmaking, like other kinds of good overhead, makes the rest of your money perform 10-1000x more effectively.

As long as organizations like your reinforce the idea that "efficiency" means "everyone reinventing the wheel every day for themselves, so as not to spend a penny more than necessary on centralized decision-making," intelligent giving won't exist anywhere - it'll just be a dream of donors spending time they don't have.