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Mostrando entradas con la etiqueta Caridad. Mostrar todas las entradas
Mostrando entradas con la etiqueta Caridad. Mostrar todas las entradas
Kleine Herzen (Pequeños corazones)
Why Can't We Sell Charity Like We Sell Perfume? by Dan Pallotta
Wall Street Journal.
In his 1630 sermon "A Model of Christian Charity," Gov. John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony warned his Puritan followers about the perils of pursuing worldly riches. By turning to "pleasure and profit," he wrote, "we shall surely perish." Gov. Winthrop himself would have been well acquainted with those perils: At the same time, he and his business partner were busy calculating how much they might earn by trading in a range of goods, from hemp to iron.
The early Puritan settlers in the New World were pulled in opposite directions by competing value systems. They were extremely aggressive capitalists, but they were also strict Calvinists, taught that self-interest was a sure path to eternal damnation. How could they negotiate this psychological tension? Charity became a big part of the answer—an economic sanctuary in which they could do penance for their profit-making tendencies, at five cents on the dollar.
Today, Americans are the world's most generous contributors to philanthropic causes. Each year, we give about 2% of our GDP to nonprofit organizations, nearly twice as much as the U.K., the next closest nation, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Some 65% of all American households with an income of less than $100,000 donate to some type of charity, according to the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, as does nearly every household with an income greater than $100,000. These contributions average out to about $732 a year for every man, woman and child in America.
Yet we cling to a puritan approach to how those donations are spent: Self-deprivation is our strategy for social change. The dysfunction at the heart of our approach is neatly captured by our narrow, negative label for the charitable sector: "not-for-profit."
It's time to change how society thinks about charity and social reform. The donating public is obsessed with restrictions—nonprofits shouldn't pay executives too much, or spend a lot on overhead or take risks with donated dollars. It should be asking whether these organizations have what they need to actually solve problems. The conventional wisdom is that low costs serve the higher good. But this view is killing the ability of nonprofits to make progress against our most pressing problems. Long-term solutions require investment in things that don't show results in the short term.
We have two separate rule books: one for charity and one for the rest of the economic world. The result is discrimination against charities in five critical areas.
First, we allow the for-profit sector to pay people competitive wages based on the value they produce. But we have a visceral reaction to the idea of anyone making very much money helping other people. Want to pay someone $5 million to develop a blockbuster videogame filled with violence? Go for it. Want to pay someone a half-million dollars to try to find a cure for pediatric leukemia? You're considered a parasite.
Two years ago, a group of senators raised questions about the compensation of the CEO of the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, which totaled $998,591 for 2008, nearly half of which consisted of catch-up obligations for her retirement. The critics ignored the fact that over the previous eight years, the CEO had tripled the Clubs' network-wide revenue to $1.5 billion. Would the Clubs have been better off hiring a less talented CEO for $100,000 and leaving revenue stagnant, at a loss of $1 billion?
We tend to think that policing salaries of charitable groups is an ethical imperative, but for would-be leaders, it results in a mutually exclusive choice between doing well for yourself and doing good for the world—and it causes many of the brightest kids coming out of college to march directly into the corporate world.
A second area of discrimination is advertising and marketing. We tell the for-profit sector to spend on advertising until the last dollar no longer produces a penny of value, but we don't like to see charitable donations spent on ads. We want our money to go directly to the needy—even though money spent on advertising dramatically increases the money available for the needy.
In 2006, the consulting firm Changing Our World estimated that charities providing health care and human services spent about $1.5 billion on marketing, versus $729 billion for marketing in the rest of the economy. That translates into one message for health and human-services causes for every 479 messages for something else. This imbalance is a big part of the reason that charitable giving has remained constant in the U.S. at about 2% of GDP since we began measuring it in the 1970s. In 40 years, the nonprofit sector hasn't been able to take market share away from the for-profit sector. But how can it if it isn't allowed to market?
A third disadvantage for charities is the expectation of a home run on every at-bat. If Paramount Pictures makes a $200 million movie that flops, no one calls the attorney general. But if a nonprofit produces a $5 million community fundraising event that doesn't result in a 70% profit for the cause, its character is called into question. So, naturally, nonprofit leaders tend to avoid daring new fundraising endeavors that might put them at risk.
A fourth problem is the time frame during which nonprofits are supposed to produce results: immediately. Amazon.com went for six years without returning a dime to investors, who stood by the company because they understood its long-term goals. But nonprofits are expected to send every donation immediately to the needy. This demand is policed by tax forms that measure the amount spent on direct services every 12 months.
Finally, the for-profit sector is allowed to pay investors a financial return to attract their capital. The nonprofit sector, by definition, cannot. So the for-profit sector monopolizes the multitrillion-dollar capital markets, and the nonprofit sector is starved for growth and risk capital. Why shouldn't an investor be able to take a risk—and get a return—on an investment that allows a charity to double in size? And why wouldn't we want to encourage it to do so?
If you have any doubt about the effects of the separate rule book for charities, consider one sobering statistic: Since 1970, the number of nonprofits that have crossed the $50 million line in annual revenue is 144, according to George Overholser and Sean Stannard Stockton, writing on the blog Tactical Philanthropy. The number of for-profits that have crossed that line during the same period is 46,132.
In short, we are asking nonprofit groups to deal with social problems whose scale is beyond easy comprehension, while denying those groups the tools they need to build any meaningful scale themselves. Something is wrong when Coca-Cola and Burger King have a potential for growth that we deny, on principle, to the Boys & Girls Clubs and the National Breast Cancer Coalition.
In recent years, some observers have advanced the notion that philanthropy has been tried and failed, and isn't necessary anymore. Business will solve all of the world's problems, they say. They point to the Clinton Global Initiative's harnessing of market forces to use a high-volume, low-price approach to make AIDS drugs more accessible to poor countries. See what Starbucks is doing for poor coffee farmers, we hear.
But business, for all the strides it is making, will always leave some part of the problem unaddressed. An estimated 1.8 million adults and children still die of AIDS every year. And there are some issues for which there are no markets outside of philanthropy. How do you monetize easing the loneliness of a shut-in senior? How do you address the economic needs of those who lack the wherewithal to become coffee farmers, beyond the reach of even the bottom rung of the global economy?
Business can't solve all of the world's problems. Capitalism can—but only if it is permitted in the nonprofit sector. If we free the nonprofit sector to hire the best talent in the world, take fundraising risks, use marketing to build demand and invest capital for new revenue-generating efforts, we could bring private ingenuity to bear on those problems and would not need to look to government to fill the gaps.
Where would the money come from? From us. If we allowed the nonprofit sector to build the kind of demand for philanthropy that Hollywood builds for movies, we would be on our way to the necessary scale. Today, Americans give about $300 billion to nonprofit organizations annually, according to Giving USA. Only about 16% of that—$48 billion—goes to health and human services. A large part of the remainder goes to religious and educational institutions. If we could increase charitable giving in the U.S. to 2.5% of GDP from 2% of GDP, that would amount to an additional $75 billion in annual giving. If that money went disproportionately to health and human services, it could as much as triple the funding available for those causes. Now that's scale.
Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University economist, has estimated that the cost to end extreme poverty in the world is about $175 billion annually. A half-percentage-point bump in annual giving to charity as a percentage of GDP in the U.S. alone could put us close to halfway there.
This idea that investment in growth can create growth is not theory. Fundraising consultant James Greenfield estimates that, for major gifts, every 10 cents spent on fundraising produces, on average, a dollar back. For direct-mail solicitations, the cost is 20 cents per dollar back. For special events, 50 cents. Investment in fundraising and marketing multiplies the money put into it. For example, in just five years, Share Our Strength, a national organization committed to ending childhood hunger, was able to quadruple the money it raised by investing in fundraising. A $30 million organization in 2010, it has grown into a $43 million organization today, just two years later.
For this to work, how would charities need to be set up? Not very differently. It is not illegal for charities to spend money on advertising or to hire great talent. It is not so much the law that needs to change as our thinking. Charities need to know they won't be punished by donors for engaging in unconventional business practices.
There are statutory changes that could be made to allow, for example, a stock market for charity, wherein investors could earn returns on revenue streams that their risk capital makes possible, and even trade on related futures. But changes in our thinking would provide more than enough room for a start at improvement.
How would we assess charities if not by how little they spend on overhead? With three simple questions: What are their goals? What progress are they making toward them? And how do they know?
The data for this kind of evaluation could be distributed via a massive iTunes for charity, covering every nonprofit in America regardless of size, and it could be updated regularly. It could replace the fragmented array of watchdog agencies that evaluate—largely on the basis of overhead ratios—just 7,500 of the 1.5 million nonprofits in America.
It's time to declare independence from the 1630s. A few decades ago, pork producers got together to change the image of their product as a fatty heart-attack-waiting-to-happen. The result was the slogan "Pork, the Other White Meat," and the campaign was wildly successful. If we can change the way that the public thinks about pork, we can change the way it thinks about charity. And if we can do that, charity can change the world.
—Mr. Pallotta created the AIDS Rides and Breast Cancer 3-Day fundraising events and is the author of the new book, "Charity Case: How the Nonprofit Community Can Stand Up for Itself and Really Change the World."
A version of this article appeared September 15, 2012, on page C1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Why Can't We Sell Charity Like We Sell Perfume?.
The End of Charity
Theodore Dalrymple.
A short while ago in Sao Paulo I witnessed in a restaurant something that moved me. Among the waiters, dressed in the same uniform as the others - that is, white shirt, black trousers and burgundy bow tie – was a young man with Down’s Syndrome. He was clearly very happy and proud to work there and to make himself useful: he cleared dishes, wiped glasses, and so forth. (The restaurant, incidentally, was a good one.)
I do not know whether or not the waiter with Down’s Syndrome was connected in any way with the owner or manager of the restaurant, but his employment there seemed to me an imaginative and efficient act of management, and not merely a charitable one. Of course, the young man in question benefited – you could see that by the pride on his face; but so did the restaurant as a business, in more ways than one.
The effect on both customers and staff of employing the young man was likely to be highly beneficial. Customers would probably see him and conclude that the owner was a decent and therefore an honest man, not unscrupulous, trustworthy. The presence of someone patently more unfortunate than they would inhibit their inclination, if any, to petty complaint; they would feel ashamed to carp. Satisfaction rushes in where complaint fears to tread.
As for the staff, they, in keeping an eye open for the welfare and safety of the young man, would be aware that they were performing a meritorious social duty and not just helping the owner to a profit; and behaving well self-reinforces good behaviour. Their propensity to complain, if any, would likewise be reduced. Though strict and narrow analysis might demonstrate that the waiter with Down’s Syndrome was not worth his wages – slowness, low productivity, breakages, etc. – his intangible morale-boosting outweighed by far his deficiencies as an employee.
I have noticed this effect before. For example, I have been asked several times to a certain radio studio to give the public the inestimable benefit of my opinion, usually in a few seconds flat. (All opinions should be expressed as concisely as possible, but not more concisely than possible.) And at this certain studio is employed as a receptionist, who shows guests to the various rooms in which they will give vent, a young black woman who is both blind and somewhat physically handicapped, requiring sticks to walk.
From the point of view of Taylorian, time-and-motion efficiency, perhaps, this would seem a foolish arrangement. The person whom she is supposed to be assisting ends up assisting her in the performance of her duty. Is this political correctness gone mad?
No. The young woman has a delightful personality, a cheerful disposition, an evident liking for the public with whom she has to deal. Once again, factious complaint about trifling inconvenience – being kept waiting a few minutes, for example - is rendered not only shameful but absurd. For what are a few minutes’ wait to set against a lifetime of blindness and a deformity that makes each step an effort of will? One would have to be a swine to complain in her presence (not that such egotistical swine cannot be found, of course).
On the way to the recording room, the receptionist asks the guest whether he would mind helping her with the various doors en route. By the time he sits down before the microphone, therefore, he is in a thoroughly good or mellow mood, aware of what a nice fellow he is for having helped a poor unfortunate with such good grace: though, of course, it is in fact she who has helped him.
When, then, someone else says something foolish, preposterous or even nasty on air, the guest feels no anger, and replies as if a soft answer not only turned away wrath but convinced the foolish. Indeed, if the young woman should ever be sacked from her job, it will be because of her calming effect, because broadcasters increasingly demand (at least in Britain) that there should be confrontation rather than discussion, the former – supposedly - being infinitely more entertaining than the latter. Broadcast confrontations are now to the British what gladiatorial combat was to the Romans.
I shall give just one more example of the salutary presence of the obviously handicapped (if you give too many examples you become boring, if you give few you are accused of being anecdotal). One day a young mentally handicapped man was admitted to the prison in which I worked as a doctor, on a charge of having sexually molested a young woman. The assault was alarming to her rather than dangerous; the young man was of such a physique that it was difficult to imagine him overpowering anyone, though he had not even tried to do so.
He was sent to prison not because it was the right place for him, but because it was the only place that could be found for him at the time: a flurry of humanitarianism having previously closed down all the other institutions that might have cared for him.
Normally sex offenders, of whatever kind, are regarded by other prisoners as the lowest of the low: it is only thus that prisoners can boost their own morale by conceiving of people worse than themselves. Indeed, sex offenders have generally to be separated for their own safety from other prisoners; if not, they are attacked and injured, sometimes seriously. Moral depravity is not incompatible with moral indignation – and, of course, vice versa.
On this occasion, however, the prisoners recognised that the young man was worthier of pity than indignation: they made an exception in his case. Indeed, they looked after him with solicitude because he was so obviously distressed by a situation that he could not understand. (I shall not easily forget his howls of distress.)
They comforted him, they shared their things with him; they succeeded in calming him down. And while he remained in the prison, the prisoners in his location behaved better; they were softened by the licence his presence gave them to relax their hardness, their toughness, their cynicism that was otherwise essential to survival in the social, or anti-social, world of prison. Normally, such a lowering of the guard brings instant retribution; but not in this case.
Now the politico-bureaucratic soul, when it becomes apprised of such cases, immediately perceives in them an opportunity for increasing its own dominion. For if it the case that the presence of the handicapped often improves morale, and even morality, is it not obvious that such a presence should be made obligatory, decreed by law? Will this not make the occasional the general, and thus add to the happiness of mankind? After all, not every manager is as charitable and imaginative as those of the restaurant or radio studio, nor does every prison location have its handicapped person to soften the mores of the other prisoners. Acts of charity, understanding and solidarity must therefore be legislated for, so that they become institutionalised. For what is possible on one occasion must be possible on all occasions.
Justice and equity demand it. Why, for example, should the young man in the Sao Paulo restaurant have benefited from the enlightenment of the manager or owner when others, perhaps thousands of others, had no such lucky chance? Worse still, it is likely, even probable, that the young man in question benefited from some personal connection from which, by definition, others, just as deserving as he, could not benefit. And nothing – nothing – is worse than injustice.
Now of course where equity is concerned, it would be far easier to insist that the young man in the restaurant be made redundant than that other such young men (and women) be employed. There could then be no accusation of unfairness or injustice, since all in his position would be treated alike. But such a solution to the problem would provide no opportunity, or very little opportunity, for the politico-bureaucratic class to intervene in the affairs of men. Much better, and more obvious, from that class’s point of view, would be legislation to compel what was previously only voluntary. Indeed, a decree that every enterprise should take on handicapped staff offers a rich field for inspection and bureaucratic bullying in the name of humanity.
How delightful are the prospects! Needless to say, what constitutes handicap is a matter of endless possible dispute, because handicap is not categorical, it is dimensional. What is a serious handicap for a footballer is not necessarily an serious handicap for an accountant, and vice versa.
Many delightful, intractable and therefore profitable disputes loom. Is drug-addiction, for example, a medical condition, and therefore a handicap? Should enterprises therefore be obliged to take as employees the percentage of drug-addicts that exist in the wider world? And how wide should that wider world be? If an enterprise happens to be sited in a community in which there are no drug addicts to employ, should it go looking for them?
But the fundamental objection to institutionalising charitable acts by government fiat is that it hardens the heart and makes compassion almost impossible: there can be cruelty without discretion, but not compassion or real feeling (this is not quite true, but almost true).
Let me illustrate what I mean by reference to the social workers in the hospital in which I once worked. I take it as being beyond reasonable doubt that there are some people who fall on hard times through no fault of their own and who are therefore particularly deserving of assistance. But I was unable to persuade many of the social workers in my hospital of this, because if some cases were particularly deserving of assistance it followed that others were not; and it was part of the ideology of the social workers that they should not assist people according to their desert, but only according to their need.
This had the horrible consequence that the social workers were not able to exert themselves in proportion to a person’s desert; and since the worst-behaved were adept at manufacturing need, it meant that the most deserving were often comparatively neglected. Moreover, this took its toll on the social workers themselves, for with rare and saintly exceptions, it is impossible for people to feel compassion to all equally, irrespective of desert. In other words, the social workers had to suppress their natural feelings; and when such feelings are suppressed long enough, they atrophy and cease to exist. And that is precisely what I observed among them.
It is, of course, true that judgments of desert vary, and even where it is agreed as to what constitutes desert error is possible and indeed inevitable: the deserving might be taken for the undeserving, and vice versa. But the consequences of making no judgments are worse than the consequences of sometimes making the wrong ones: indeed, refraining from making a judgment is itself to make a judgment of a sort.
What is given as of right is harmful alike to the donor and the recipient. It shrivels the donor’s heart and turns kindness into an unwanted obligation; it renders the recipient incapable of gratitude, to such an extent that he might not even realise that he has received anything (the rioters in London, for example, said they had nothing, when those of them who had never worked or been net taxpayers had never gone hungry, never lacked for clothes or shelter, were provided with electronic gadgets, were guaranteed free healthcare and had received a free education – for them, this was nothing because it all came as of right).
That judgments in the past were harsh or unfeeling is, alas, the case. But that is a reason for refining our judgment, not for refraining from exercising it at all. If we do that, we shall end up with a society of cold comfort, where the faculty of kindness will wither, and where the expression of human solidarity will be confined to paying taxes, an indefinitely large proportion of which will never even reach their supposed beneficiaries.
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