Profiting from Charity?

The relationship between charities and gambling goes back a long way. The use of lotteries and raffles to raise funds was a staple of community fundraising long before the National Lottery appeared to distribute hundreds of millions of pounds worth of gambling proceeds to communities across the country.
 
But the last few weeks have seen two new initiatives seeking to combine gambling and charity, with a somewhat mixed response from the sector.
 
The Health Lottery, launched with a big fanfare, was met with even bigger outrage from ACEVO, who had a number of complaints. First that the new lottery would divert money away from the National Lottery distributors; second, that the proportion of money going to good causes was only 20p per £1; and third, that the enterprise set up by Richard Desmond was “for-profit”.

NCVO were less vocal about the issue, despite their presumably more informed position following their involvement in the BingoLotto scheme a couple of years ago, which if successful would have given the same proportion to good causes.  
 
But what seemed to draw much less ire was a far more bizarre and, for me, worrisome project launched a week earlier, called Guess2Give. The concept is based on the inexorable rise of people taking part in challenges to raise money for charity. Basically, I decide to climb a mountain/jump out of a plane/eat my own weight in cheesecake and post it on the website. Then you can pay to hazard a guess on how long it takes/where I land/how much I vomit. It’s £3 a go, with 50p going to a prize fund, up to £2 going to a selection of charities, and 50p going to the company running it to cover costs/profits.
 
Now I’m pretty outraged by this for a number of reasons.
 
The first is the references to this as giving. The word ‘giving’ cannot be used in any context to describe any of these schemes, especially Guess2Give – other than in the phrase ‘in no way is this giving’. Spending £3 to make a £2 donation or spending £1 to make a 20p donation is about as inefficient as giving gets.
 
More worrying for me though, is that there seems to be an acceptance from charities that it’s fine for the voluntary sector to be a place to make money; that it’s a market to be exploited from outside – as long as some financial benefit comes back to it. The bone of contention from charities seems only to be about how big their cut is, not whether or not it’s right for companies to use the goodness of giving to charity to incentivise gambling for private profit.
 
So far as I can see, there are two ways to resolve this. The first is to tell them to sling their hook. It’s easy to not sign up to such schemes, although that may mean foregoing much-needed income when pressure to generate it has never been greater. The cut, whatever it is, will always be tempting, especially if it comes with little or no investment from the recipient.
 
The second is to beat them at their own game – show them that we can be ruthless too, that we are prepared to go further than the charity profiteers to make as much money as we can, and to use ALL of it for good.

See those two chuggers? They’re going to race each other for your donation - I’ll give you 5/4 on the skinny one in the hat. Pay to make a guess? Click here to guess how much VAT we unfairly will be unable to recover this financial year, or how many contracts we lose to private sector providers this year.  Or why not voluntary sector Fight Club?  I can think of plenty of tasty match-ups which I’m sure would bring the punters in…
 
I’m joking of course.  And fortunately there are alternatives to all of these flawed schemes. Like Guessability, a not-for-profit site where fundraisers can use the hook of making a guess and winning a prize, with every penny donated going to the chosen charity, and nobody taking any cut whatsoever.

Follow  and/or argue with me on Twitter @ben_wittenberg