Charitable Donations and overheads - Discuss

[ikonia]

I've been listening to Radio 1 on my drive into the office this week.

There has been a lot of discussion on the Red Nose day thats fast approaching, and some of the ways and incentives to donate.

One of which was the red nose little Britain DVD - sold at £5 with at least £3.50 going to comic releif. Now idealy anyone involved in a charitable production such as this would give as much for free. Which is what looks like is happening. eg: £1.50 to produce and distribute a DVD suggest people working cheap/free. I'd have no problem buying this DVD and thinking that the money raised had gone to the charity as the £1.50 overhead is reasonable.

Now there was a chance to win tickets to Chris Moyels Rallyoake night where you text the answer to a question to a Red Nose text number and you get tickets. The cost of this was your standard text rate + £1 - of which 70p will go to charity.

This is the part I'm not clear on,

Standard text rate - phone operators are not doing a discount they are just charging normally rate and making their proffit. - so they have costs covered (more so)

So where does the 30p of the £1 go ? looking at the ratio %30 of the donation is actually quite a high rate, who and where does this money go to ? what is the purpose for it ? is it right ?

Now I know this is for charity and I'm not moaning about donating £1 for example, I'm just curious to the ethics behind it when a DVD can be produced for £1.50 yet a text message thats already paid for in terms of infrastructure costs from the phone companies requires 30p.

Thoughts ?

[Funkstar]

Some thoughts, might not be 100% accurate

There will be a lot of backend work colating the messages, administering the competition etc. You also have reverse SMS charging in there too. So although the network charge you for the initial text, they also charge the organisation running the line for the extra billing.

All this extra admin is probably worked out at 30p per message, not 30%, so if the charge was £2, you would be donating £1.70, or 15%. Bu then at £2 there would be a lot less people taking part, so they would probably make less money.

These things also usually state something like "at least 70p of which goes to charity" which means that if there is a greater than expected number of submitions, their cost per text goes down and the donations go up.

I could be totaly wrong on that lot, but thats my thoughts anyway