Series: Making Cents of Charity

I've contemplated writing a series about charities and common fundraising practices since Christmas, when retrospectives and takedowns of Band Aid's 1984 hit Do they know it's Christmas? made their annual rounds. To be up front, I worked as a door-to-door fundraiser in Canada for several months while I waited for my visa application to return to New Zealand to be approved. It was a great job, and allowed me to work on behalf of global charities like World Wildlife Fund and Doctors without Borders. It also gave me insight into the pitfalls and controversies that exist in this field, and how charities and their audiences mutually struggle to adapt to each other's evolving needs and interests. Practices for public engagement that seemed well-meaning in the 1970s continue, despite decades of criticism about child safety and questions about how much money actually reaches people and communities most in need.

Many of us who grew up with access to a TV may remember long ads that flashed through scenes of shanty towns, dirt roads, dishevelled children, and emaciated infants too exhausted to respond to the flies landing on their faces. These edits are followed by a B- or C-list celebrity exhorting viewers to sponsor a child for as little as $1 a day. Sally Struthers' long partnerships with the Christian Children's Fund (formerly China's Child Fund, now just ChildFund) and Save The Children (which officially discontinued their sponsorship programme in January 2026) come to mind:

At the end of part one, charities that used child sponsorship were facing a period of transition, both at home and in the countries they served. Conflicts throughout Asia during this time obviously hampered child charity operations, regardless of their fundraising model: World Vision had to abandon operations in Vietnam and Cambodia, and SOS Children's Villages had two of their villages taken over by the Vietnamese government in 1976. The retreat from parts of Asia experiencing war or other conflicts would be a boon for other countries, although World Vision described having to abandon 23,000 sponsored children with their retreat. By the 1980s child sponsorship would surge again, as millions of dollars in humanitarian aid was sent to anyone and everyone working in, or singing about, Ethiopia during the famines of the early-to-mid 1980s.

For every dollar you donate to charities, a portion is usually directed towards covering administrative and fundraising costs. What is the maximum percentage that is acceptable to you? The rule of thumb is a fundraising efficiency ratio of 30:70 - 70% to programming, and 30% to overheads (including fundraising, management, and other general costs). However, amongst charity watchdogs and monitors such as CharityWatch, Charity Intelligence Canada, and the Charities Review Council, a charity is considered financially efficient, or at least performing satisfactorily, if overhead spending is between 20 and 35%, with between 65 and 80% distributed to programmes. Some charities and non-profit trade organisations argue that excessive focus on financial overhead can cause harm, and can actually have an overall detrimental effect on programme investment. However, how overhead spending is calculated and communicated varies, and from some charities the amount deducted from donations for admin and fundraising is less than their true costs.