My year of charity — and why it failed

In 2016 I wanted to run an experiment I later called “my year of charity”. The goal was to support a good cause every month for a year. I wanted to spread the donations across different charities and regions. In this review you’ll get to know about the…

• Challenges I faced
• The positive impact and
• Why I failed to finish the year

First hurdle — how to find a ‘good’ charity

It starts with the information that’s available online – or rather the information that is not there. Like with regular companies, some websites are better than others. Of course, you can’t expect those organisations to blow a lot of money for online marketing or SEO, you want them to spend almost 100% on their cause. But how would you and I find out about them, get to know what they are doing and get to understand the impact they are having if those things are not easy to find or represented in a good, modern way? 

Second hurdle — how to measure impact

My investor mindset made me asses the impact my donation would have in a specific way: Investments are measured by ROI (return of investment) – how much your money you will get back. For a charitable cause you don’t expect to get something back for yourself of course, but you want to make sure your money is spent wisely and effectively.

In the end it comes simply down to how much money is really spent (the money you donated minus the cost the charities face) on the things you want to support (for example the environment) and what it turns into (for example number of trees planted and amount of CO2 absorbed). If you look for these kind of measurable outcomes it allows you to compare the charities with the biggest impact.

This is not the only way to measure efficiency but for my approach I needed something straightforward to work with; I wanted to donate to several causes and needed a way to help me make a decision. 

Third hurdle — payment

I did not expect this to be a problem but the payment experience differs greatly. I would have liked some options to choose from, including PayPal or Debit and Credit Card. But it’s not a given that all or any of those options are available.

Some only offer bank transfer. Others offer debit and credit card but via an unsecured connection – that’s like sending a postcard with your card details via mail, hoping no one reads it on the way to the recipient.

Success by the month

Good news is that I found some really great charities over the months! Here is the detailed view, month by month

• Tree Aid in January
  • 1 Watering Can
  • 1 Bucket
  • 1 Mooring tree donated
    • providing nutrition and medicine with lifespan of around 20 years
    • grows over 2 meters in 3 months
    • filters 20 kg CO2 per year
    • 400 Kg CO2 emission averted (over lifetime of 20 years)
• Ripple Africa in February
  • 2 cookstoves 
  • saving 2 households 67% on firewood
  • preventing severe burns for the families
  • improving health of around 10 people 
• SolarAid in March
  • 7 solar lights 
  • 44 people accessing these lights
  • £900+ saved for families*
  • 8,000+ extra hours of child study time*
  • 3.8 tonnes of CO₂ emissions averted*
  • 25 People experiencing better health
  • (*over the lifetime of the solar lights)
• Pur Projet in April
  • 6 trees planted
  • 500 kg CO2 filtered over the lifespan
• Practical Action in May
  • Renewable energy project in Peru
• Picaflor House in June
  • Art material for 40 kids for a month

Summary of the impact

• 7 trees donated and planted
• CO2 offset = 2.8 tonnes over lifetime of trees
• CO2 averted = 3.8 tonnes over lifetime of solar lights
• Renewable energy generated (unknown)
• Families life improved 10
• Kids supported 40

Summary of my findings

1. The field of charitable organisations is quite segregated. There are only a few standards, they can differ greatly between countries and not all organisations follow them
2. It can be difficult to do research on a charity. Sometimes the information they provide is limited or has gaps, making a background very hard.
3. Charities measure their success differently and it’s not easy to compare the impact they have when it comes to quantity or quality. 
4. The payment experience varies greatly.
5. There are some great charities out there with people doing great jobs. Very inspiring.

Why my year of charity failed

After only six months I stopped my year of charity. It was not a decision I made one day.  It was something that slowly happened over time. Normally I would have a reminder popping up every couple of weeks to get working on the next blog post: research, find a charity, do background checks, decide, donate and blog about it. Not complicated. 

It went well for a while. I’ve found exciting projects to support; researched, donated and wrote about them. But then life got in the way. Some other things took priority. Every now and then the research or writing the blog post was postponed. At some point I was over a month behind. It was so much to do just to catch up and then to prepare the next months. It felt so overwhelming that I did not get anything done and stopped.

I never talked about it. I only posted the monthly blog posts but never this review.Here it is now, over two years later. Oops.

What did not work for me

In hindsight it’s easier to say why I failed at my own project. I think these are the reasons why I failed at it:

• I am not naturally a writer so it felt hard to write something, even a simple blog post.
• I dit not have a good routine or workflow in place. Today I know how useful a good routine or habit is. 
• I could have chunked down the big tasks into smaller, more actionable ones to make it less overwhelming.

You can help me now

I am thinking of a way to fix this. I am working on a new project called “Futual”. Join me in saving the planet. If we fail this we are all doomed.

Nils

Founder ?and investor ?
Environmentalist ? and futurist ?

Here I think out loud and talk about things. Opinions are my own but happy to share.