Welcome to the drip-drip feed of utter nonsense.
It is telling you that you are SAD!
Hello. Came across your blog in random wandering at work and can offer some insight as someone involved in the sector.
On one hand Oxfam's overall admin costs are only 3.18% - pretty good for a multimillion dollar business.
It does seem to have, on the face of it, high fundraising costs especially as regards voluntary income (the amount people choose to give rather than say the govt) is 48.9%, meaning half the amount that people give to Oxfam is spent on fundraising. But that isn't the case of 1 pound in every 2.
Firstly this 48.9% includes the costs of their shops, which serve many functions - recycling used materials, providing volunteers with skills, promoting the brand name as well as selling fairtrade goods etc, so Oxfam would argue that this money isn't wasted. Also that voluntary income includes people buying things from the shops, so while it is a voluntary donation its different from putting money in the tin.
Also I'm sure the deeper picture is more complica
Ah, the comment box ate the rest of my comment. Basically I was saying that as a charity the vast majority of OXfam's income is restricted to specific causes. This means its very difficult to actually keep the kind of infrastructure in place that allows it to respond to events like the Tsunami (who pays to keep disaster relief workers sitting around waiting for a disaster). Large funders often hate to pay for things like pension contributions, maternity and sick leave and inflation pay increases.
So the money you give to Oxfam as a general donation actually has a significance beyond its proportional amount to the overall income. This is the money that keeps the cogs oiled basically.
For more info on this you could look at the Major Charities (www.dsc.org.uk/acatalog/
Reports_and_Reference.html).
Hope that is useful.
Niall
It is useful, thank you. And that link is exactly what I needed.
I didn't really factor in having to keep money back for disasters and the like.
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