Can You Help Us, Please?

Can You Help Us, Please?

We all know those young, motivated and unbelievably persistent promoters on the streets with their “Save our Planet” and “Against Animal Abuse” folders. We’ve all seen those little Asian, African or South-American kids looking down from billboards along the roads of every city in the world. Further, everyone of us knows events like the Life Ball in Vienna or has heard of similar events where celebrities like George Clooney and his BFFs Angelina and Brad demonstrate how incomparably charitable they are. But how many people do you know who actually donate something to a good cause? All those wealthy stars are only a small number among the billions of people whom charity companies try to reach. Do you donate?

It is true that there are enough causes we can donate money to: Saving the rainforest, helping poor children and families, promoting animals’ rights, supporting research on cancer and other diseases, helping victims of natural disasters and many more. Sure, some causes seem more worthy than others; some say that ensuring that a child has enough to eat to live longer than five years is more important than supporting research on an outlandish disease which affects only twenty people around the globe. Personally I think that, as long as someone supports something charitable, it does not really matter which organisation he or she chooses.

There have been a number of studies on the issue already. The research dealt with questions like whether young or old people, poor or rich people, males or females are more charitable. One study, which explored the discrepancies when it comes to gender, found that men are less charitable than woman. In fact, women are on average 40 percent more likely to donate money to charitable causes than their male counterparts. However, there are some categories of charity to which men donate more than women: Arts and Culture. Other causes, like organisations helping families, or religious organisations, are dominated by female donors.

Further, the marital status influences people’s charitable tendencies: People who are, or were, married are more likely to donate money than people who have never been married. Interestingly enough, widowed men and women are most likely to give money to charity – men (71%) more than women (67%). One reason that was given for why women are more easily drawn to charitable causes is that it lies in their nature to sustain life and therefore they might be especially attracted by posters with needy children on them.

Another aspect is age. Do older or younger people donate more? According to a study on this issue, young people donate less than older people. This is not exactly surprising as young people often have to deal with the economic vagaries of finding a job and settling down. People under thirty-five also often start a family, which means that there is not a lot of money left they could donate. Older people, on the other side, have settled down; their kids might already be grown up; and they earn more money because they have been working in their company for many years.

What is interesting about this is that, according to a study from 2003 (see article 1 and article 2), young people who earn a lot of money give less to charity than young people who do not earn a lot of money:

Among taxpayers 35 and younger, the report found, those earning less than $200,000 made gifts equal to 1.87 percent of their investment assets, a figure that fell to 0.5 percent for those who made between $200,000 and $10 million, and to 0.4 percent for those earning more than $10 million.  

This is quite interesting, since the common reasons, that I named before, for why young people might be less likely to donate do not apply here. Someone earning more than ten million dollars a year clearly has enough money to start a family if he or she liked and would still have enough money left for charity. Unfortunately, there are no reasons named in the article which might explain why young, rich people don’t donate as much as their fellow — workers who earn less money.

Sometimes, charitable organisations do not always have the best reputation. It has become well-known that the money people donate sometimes ends up being spent on the organisation and administration of a company or gets completely lost in the progress (for example, see article).

This is, of course, not what someone who donates his or her money to help a child in the Third World or victims of natural disasters expects. But still, you just need to check various organisations and have a closer look at how those companies work. Most of them provide enough information on how the donated money is used, and there are also external organisations which offer information on companies and compare different charitable organisations – and their effectivity – to each other.

In the end, it really does not matter whether yout decide to donate money once a year – as many people do during the Christmas season –  or once a month. There are enough reasons to do it, but also some which speak against it. The biggest problem we face nowadays is that charitable organisations have become (too) omnipresent: there are posters on billboards, promoters on the streets, adverts on television and on radio. Charity is everywhere – and  we have gotten used to it. We’ve  gotten used to poverty and cancer and our environment slowly falling apart. Thailand, Haiti, Japan – those are the brief, but monumental disasters that still catch our attention, while dangers which accompany us through our everyday life have become invisible.

Among people I know, there aren’t but one or two that might give money to charity. It doesn’t hurt to give some of your earnings to people who need them more than you do. We don’t need to have the latest fashion, and we don’t need to go out every weekend and spend money on shoes and drinks. What we need to do is to open our eyes once in a while and check whether anyone needs our help.

However, even if you don’t have the money to, for example, sponsor a child somewhere, just put the one or two cents change in that little donation can when you’re at your favourite coffee shop. It’s a start and, besides, just imagine: two cents donated by every inhabitant of your country would actually make a difference.