WWF International

On the weekend I watched a nature documentary. Which is not something I normally do. Confessions first – I did so because Stephen Fry was the host and I’m a complete fan boy.

In the series he was revisiting endangered animals which were were featured in Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine’s, Last Chance to radio/book series from the 1990s. This particular episode focused on the Northern White Rhino and some band of Gorilla that took a trip that nearly killed Stephen to reach.

I’d still rather see him as Jeeves in Jeeves and Wooster but it was interesting enough and made me decide to go with an environmental charity for the week. So I’ve chosen WWF.

WWF is one of those charities that raise the question of whether I donate to the New Zealand branch or the International. I opted to go with the latter in this case – I’m not quite sure why, the sites were very cookie-cutter.

The international site didn’t feel as professional as I’d expect and felt littered with unnecessary social media sharing badges but had fairly decent information. The donation process was slightly torturous – they made the default choice a regular contribution with a less obvious link to a one-off. This then sent me through 2 redirects before the actual Worldpay hosted payment page. One of these required a manual click to get past and all pages were poorly styled. A pity.

So far I’ve just received a default Worldpay receipt via email with nothing from the charity. I’d hope an international charity could do better – I can see how many people might have dropped off along the way.

Still, go captain planet!

UNIFEM is the women’s fund at the United Nations, dedicated to advancing women’s rights and achieving gender equality. It provides financial and technical assistance to innovative programmes and strategies that foster women’s empowerment.

As an international charity backed by the UN their site is satisfyingly slick – doing a good job of communicating a range of general issues they are mandated to address and specific campaigns they are undertaking. Donating thought is the same-old experience with most charity sites – a single uber donation form with few frills.

UNIFEM

The bottom of the donation form did include an option to “send an e-card” if you were making the donation a gift. Which was very basic, with only one image available. For this to be useful they would have needed to promote it up-front and give a better set of card presentation options. After this there was a standard confirmation screen which was shortly followed by a thank you email and receipt.

An update on last week’s donations: Youthline were quick to respond to me and assure me they were ironing out any kinks in their site – good stuff. I also received a paper-based receipt from them, which as always is unnecessary – oh well. Lifeline also contacted me to check my donation, as it was “an odd amount” – which was a result of my calculating 10% of my spending. That was good of them, but in future I think I’ll round the amount better so as not to raise any concerns and waste anyone’s time.

On 3 February 2010, he wrote on his Twitter page that his mother had died the day before, adding: “RIP mumxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.” Four days later he wrote that he had had an “awful week” but said “friends have been great”, adding: “now i have to some how pull myself together”.

McQueen is someone I had admired for years, but as well as his death being sad for the world of fashion and even more so for his friends and family – it highlights the issue of suicide. A tragedy we have a notably high rate of in New Zealand.

Doing some research to find a charity to donate to I came across New Zealand’s national suicide prevention strategy which is worth a read if you are interested. I also came across the Charities Commission site which has a reasonable level of information on all registered charities – including financial reports if you are interested in double-checking claims made on web sites. Oddly, the one dedicated suicide charity I could find didn’t even have a website.

In the end I opted to go with Lifeline and Youthline who both provide phone counselling to those in need.

Youthline

And then to cap it off – the success page came back simply with “Scotts test” not a thank you. Then I receive an email telling me my “order status” has changed. Oh dear.

Lifeline were much smoother – using the flo2cash system I have encountered recently which presents a receipt after a single page donation form.

[ Update: Youthline were quick to respond to me and assure me they were ironing out any kinks in their site - good stuff. ]

To play us out – a live tribute by Patti Smith to McQueen below.

For my 33rd birthday I’d like to give a gift to charities. And I’d like, as their present to me, my friends to help me choose which. I’ll distribute $500 proportionally amongst the top-5.

The top 5 charities, with the amount I’ll donate, are charted below (click on the slice for the detail):

Thanks to everyone for their votes and feedback – I’ll probably do something similar again.

You can vote in the poll below from my list of preferred charities. Links for more information are on my charity page. Or if you have another suggestion then let me know via email/IM or a comment below and I’ll count that as a vote.

[ Update: Poll closed, see subsequent post for results. ]

I had to do some digging to find a children’s charity I was happy with. Too many focus on individual child sponsorship or are Christian affiliated. It is a pity that secular charities can’t state this as plainly in their marketing material as most religious charities state otherwise.

I came across Charity Navigator – which “rates” the performance of non-profits – while trying to find a charity that suited. They are fairly comprehensive, but their focus is on compiling data from the financial filings of charities that operate in the USA – so for the most part the assessments are fairly useless. That is, most charities have gotten the message they must minimise their head-office administrative costs and marketing spend – but this does little to tell you about how well they spend their money “on the ground”. They also have comment boards for each charity but, from my brief venture into them, they seem to be a battleground of extreme opinions and are best avoided.

The Save the Children donation process is a secure form hosted on a 3rd party site. This seemed a little clunky and wasn’t very well styled – as is often the case – but worked fine. Immediately after donating they presented a link to download a PDF receipt – but didn’t follow this up with an email. For those who manage their life through their inbox this might be a pain. And I wonder if they’ll spam me in the future at all, as their site has plenty of calls-to-action to join mailing lists and the donation process didn’t ask for permission for future contact. I don’t mind reasonable email contact from charities I donate to at all.

The donation process also asked which campaign I wanted to donate to – which is useful as I like being able to choose when a charity has a number of areas they work in (I went for Rewrite the Future which focuses on education for children in war torn regions) – however, to do so I had to type the campaign name into a free form field. Which implies some back end inefficiencies to process these which will eat up some of my donation.

Still, not a bad charity experience from Save the Children.

Update on Rainbow Youth donation from last week: Someone from the organisation contacted me back swiftly after I emailed about the problem with their donation process. So I feel confident recommending them.

Update on Oxfam Haiti campaign donation: I got some postal spam from them today – with a thank you note and receipt. Given I’d already been emailed a receipt this seems an unnecessary expense which I’d prefer charities to let me opt out of.

An Auckland gym franchise owner has apologised for a newsletter to members which included a link to an article entitled “Soy is making kids gay”.

Club Physical member John Kingi said he planned to cancel his gym membership after the article, by conservative American writer Jim Rutz, which said “homosexuality is always deviant”, was included in the gym’s newsletter.

In the article, Rutz claimed soy was “feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality”. [ stuff.co.nz ]

One of the “outraged” members quoted works at Rainbow Youth which reminded me they have a relatively new website, designed during the 2009 fullcodepress content. I was a member of the winning team of this slighty crazy “website in a day” competition in 2007. There’s some nice work by the 2009 New Zealand winning team on the site.

Rainbow Youth is an Auckland-based organisation that provides support, information, advocacy and education for queer young people and their families.

Rainbow Youth

Given the news I figure they’re a suitable charity for the week. They have “regular donation” options – these just require giving contact details wherein the contact you back to arrange I’m sure. And merchandise “for sale” – which requires emailing. The only direct online donation is a one-off via Paypal – which is the easiest method for taking money online without setup costs – and probably the only thing you can implement in a 24-hour competition!

This worked well – until I was sent back to the site after the Paypal donation – where I received an error page. I received a confirmation from Paypal via email so I’m sure the money has gone through – but the fact that this error occurred doesn’t instill confidence. Hopefully they’ll fix that up soon. Don’t let that stop you donating to an organisation that does a lot of good work.

I must have had 10 emails from the different charities I have given to over the years this last week – each imploring me to give to their particular Haiti appeal. Doing the research on who is spending the money most effectively is often time consuming and how to do that better is something I’d like to explore. In the meanwhile I find Oxfam generally sound and not overly opportunistic with such appeals.

Following on from my last post about doing the math on how much to donate – it was relatively easy with Buxfer. Viewing transactions for a set period is easy and then seeing the totals by tag to sum them is trivial. A better advanced search that let me select multiple-tags would have helped me do the math quicker – but no major.

Oxfam NZ's Haiti Appeal

This turned up as promised so that’s Week 1 sorted.

I’ve been using Buxfer for a couple of years now to track shared expenses with Jo so it seemed easiest to go with that as a first option. Buxfer stood out amongst the “web 2.0″ financial tools that all started showing up a few years back (Wesabe et al.) as it focused on shared expenses – letting you share bills and keep a running total of who owed what.

Buxfer.com

We’ve been using it in a fairly basic way – but now I look at it again to properly engage it for financial tracking it seems to have matured nicely. It seems, as early-adopters they’ve been nice enough to give us a paid account free – nice. You can either enter transactions manually or import statements from your bank. Tagging these by type is easy, and if you’re importing them can be fairly automated once you have a bit of data in there.

There’s a relatively OK iPhone app for tracking items when you are out.

Once you have some tagged data the site produces fairly decent graphs and breakdown of spend – and you can create a budget and see projections based on these. There’s nothing in here that I don’t see in the competition but I find the interface quick-and-easy to use. And the ability to split expenses between individuals for accurate tracking of your personal spending still stands out.

Now I’ve got the accountancy sorted its time to wait a week and pick some charities.

Relatively lucky, scrapes 'n' all

I’m a relatively lucky guy (BMX accidents aside). In the same sense that anyone reading this likely is (unless you’re reading this on an OLPC perhaps…) – I was born middle-class in a first-world country at a time when opportunities were there for the taking. For the most part I’ve had the sense to take them. And hopefully, on occasion, shown how grateful I am for them.

My greatest recurring concern is whether I am getting enough dancing in my life. Other than that I’m pretty low maintenance. (Yes, dear reader – I can hear your laughter from here). When I find myself with a surplus I’ve tried to give it to those who could benefit. For the past few years I’ve tried to be a bit more formal about my charity and give a fixed percent of what I earn away. I’m the first to admit this has met with mixed-success.

Dancing to Yacht

So for 2010 I thought I’d try doing it a little differently. Rather than promising a certain percentage of what I earn each month I’m going to give 10% on-top of everything I spend. Which is slightly more complicated but also slightly more interesting. That is, if I spend $100 on tickets to a show I will give $10 to charity. Hence “spent+10″.

The idea is that this will provide an easy way for me to visualise my giving and think about my own spending. I’ll be excluding regular expenses such as rent for now till I see how the $s work out. I could do some spreadsheet work in-advance but why ruin the fun.

I’ll let you know how it goes. I won’t be posting how much I am giving in this blog but I will keep track of charities I come across and other thoughts on giving so follow along if you’d like. (RSS just for this here.)