We understand that several of our viewers witnessed an incident on Tuesday the 23^rd of August on the Buenaventura Webcam, when a person has captured several hummingbirds from the feeders in front of the camera. We very much regret that this happened, causing upset and anger among our viewers. The incident happened when a group of young people arrived at the lodge and took advantage of the temporary absence of the person in charge to try to capture hummingbirds from the feeder. When the guard realized what happened he took immediate action, asking the person to release the birds and to leave the premises. As far as we know, the person did not wish to harm the birds and their thoughtless act has more to do with their low level of awareness than to bad intentions.

We would like to assure our viewers that we will take urgent remedial action to reduce the likelihood of such incidents happening in the future. We will put up notes in both Spanish and English warning people not to approach the feeders or attempt to touch the birds and we will put up a light barrier around the Webcam as well. The reserve staff will also explain these same rules to people who visit the premises and will keep vigilance as much as possible when people are around. In the long run, however, the best strategy is to develop a program of environmental education directed at Ecuadorians of all ages to create a culture of respect and appreciation of nature and the abundant wildlife around them. We are currently working with the municipality of Piñas to build an interpretative centre at Buenaventura, which will be the focal point of such activities. If you wish to donate towards the cost of this centre, you can do it through the World Land Trust UK Website or contact us directly at fjocotoco@andinanet.net .

Thanks for your continuing support for our work and do keep watching! We are very grateful for your help.

Zoltan Waliczky
Executive Director
Jocotoco Foundation

The WLT supports a wide range of other NGOs all over the world, so evaluating them is an important part of my job. I would also be very interested to have any other suggestions as to the things our supporters look for in a charity.

Before evaluating, it is important to re-examine your own motives for wanting to support. It is not always philanthropic. For instance I am a member of the Friends of the Royal Academy of Arts – but for purely selfish reasons — so that I get into exhibitions much more cheaply. So I am not particularly bothered by the fact that they employ over 200 people and not much more that 50% of their expenditure was on charitable activities. But that’s a special case. Conversely, I  refuse to donate to a charity  that does certain types of fundraising — giving away unsolicited ‘gifts’, or chugging for instance. Again personal bias, but I am sure we all have our idiosyncrasies. So here are my personal guidelines

1. Go to the Charity Commission website, and look at the overview of the Charity. This will summarise data on the income and expenditure, as well as the number of employees, and how much was spent on running the charity. There is a general assumption that charities should spend as little as possible on management and employ as few people as possible. But there is a limit to this. So you need to see how active the charity is. If on their website they appear to be running lots of projects, but have exceptionally low overheads, it is questionable as to how well those projects are being supervised.
2. Still on the Charity Commission website, compare the fundraising expenses with income, and then compare that with other charities in similar fields. Fundraising has a cost, but it shouldn’t be excessive. While looking at the accounts check the reserves: are they sitting on too much money? If the reserves are big, do they really need your support?
3. Go to the section on Financial History, and this will tell you whether or not the charities finances are on the way up, erratic or going downhill. In the same section it will show the ‘compliance history’ of the charity. Are they getting their annual reports in on time? If they are not alarm bells should start to ring, since there is ample time allowed for this, and it might indicate an under-resourced organisation. Particularly if it occurs more than once. See how many staff are employed, what is the average salary, how many are paid more than £60,000 p.a. (this has to be declared).
4. On the Charity Commission website, check out the Board of Trustees, and see if they have the expertise to run the particular Charity (use the Internet to research Trustees and other Board Members). It is generally a good thing if one or more of the Trustees sit on other Boards as well.
5. Then check the organisation’s website. Does it tell you much about the people running it? Do the CEO and senior staff inspire confidence? Are the celeb’s associated with the Charity appropriate? Do they do anything for the Charity? All relatively easy these to check on the Internet.
6. If you are still in doubt, phone the Charity and ask questions. And ask for a copy of their printed Annual report and Accounts, and other literature. Read the literature, and check the small print. If you decide to make a donation for a particular project, will it actually go there? Or does the small print allow the charity to do what they like with the money?

No charity should be so big or self-important as to not respond to enquiries about its finances or management. An enquirer may only be thinking of donating a relatively small amount. But they may also be considering several hundred thousand. There is no way the person at the end of a telephone can know that. Therefore, they should treat everyone the same, and be helpful. If they can’t answer your questions, there are probably two main reasons: they are either under-staffed, and lack the expertise, or they consider it unimportant to respond to you. So look around until you have found a charity you feel confident in; that it can use your donation the way you want it used, and is cost effective.

Finally, for more information about how to research charities, here is the WLT list of external links to charity resources: visit as many as possible.

The World Land Trust is not perfect, but we do try to be as transparent as possible, without overwhelming the enquirer with detail. We try and ensure we have the right number of staff to do the job efficiently and thoroughly. We could cut staff numbers, but the monitoring and evaluation of our work would certainly suffer. We could spend a lot more on fundraising, and probably raise quite a lot more, but we don’t think many of our current supporters would want to see us develop that way. We regularly check our standards against other similar charities, and if we spot some way of improving our ways of improving our communications and financial reporting we will try and implement them. We also always welcome comment and constructive criticism from our supporters.

The latest World Land Trust Annual Reports are available as PDF downloads.

There can be little doubt that two major factors have been involved in the decline: insecticides and electric lights. Fly over Europe and (provided there is  no cloud cover) you will never be out of sight of urban lighting. In fact that is true now even in the most remote parts of the world. Fly over the Amazon, and you will see electric light scattered across the landscape. Electric light attracts moths and other night flying bugs from miles around.

Insecticides have been used to wipe out the pests of crops (but of course are pretty indiscriminate), and also to clear the coastal resorts around the Mediterranean of mosquitoes. Back in the 1960s when I first visited Greece, coastal villages were swarming with bats, toads and geckos. They are now a rare sight.

But it has been heartening to see so many insects this year in and around the WLT HQ town of Halesworth. I have no idea of the cause — one thought is that it has been exceptionally warm and dry recently.

Meanwhile, we can all do our bit for wildlife by pressing local governments to reduce the impacts of street lighting, switching off our own exterior lighting, and in the UK urge the government to change the time zone to the same as in western Europe, which would mean many lights came on later in the evening . This would also have a far bigger impact than some of the other energy saving suggestions made from time to time.

Has anyone else noticed an increase in numbers of flying insects in their area? And any suggestions as to why?

Now is the time of the Third Sector Excellence Awards, where awards (with no cash attached) are dished out for applicants as dissimilar as the Nursing Film Archive, City YMCA, Afrikids, Beatbullying and the RSPB. How is the award for the Best Marketing Campaign agreed? Presumably since it does actually have a measurable outcome, it is simply a case of seeing how much WWF spent on their tiger campaign against how much came in, and comparing it with the campaigns of RSPB, Red Cross, Centrepoint and the others entered.

However, this seems to be one of the few awards where there is a quantifiable outcome; similarly the Award for Charity Trading can be based on the Annual Accounts. But nearly all the others are clearly subjective, and I really don’t think it possible to evaluate disparate organisations for awards for ‘Corporate Partnership’ or Best Employer. Let alone ‘Best Communications Campaign’ or ‘Brand Development’, all of which are not only highly subjective, but likely to depend very much on the background of the 27 judges (who are not specified on the website), and their persuasiveness.

But who actually foots the bill for this awards event? It costs the charities up to £230 a person to be present at the awards the awards (or £135 per person, no wine and book very early before you know who is in the shortlist). I doubt that many donors to charities will be over enthusiastic about their favourite charity spending their money on going along to such events – which can’t really even be justified as good for ‘networking’. And even applying for such awards costs time, and time in this instance is probably time that could have been spent on applying for grants.

Continuing my themes  of comparisons being made between apples and oranges,  Third Sector Magazine, this week  (3 August), published a report on charity giving, comparing the results from different newspapers and magazines. But how can such results have any real meaning? It’s not even comparing apples with oranges. It’s actually comparing tigers with god. Comparing street kids with art galleries..

As per usual, views, comments alternative suggestions always welcome (and corrections if I have got anything factually incorrect).

There seems to be a perception that celebs, by their very presence enhance a charity’s reputation, but do they? I often think that the celeb benefits far more than the charity, so perhaps it is time that there was more disclosure about how much they actually contribute. Do they contribute cash? Do they give x number of hours of their time? Can a value be put on their contribution?

There are of course differences in the use of celebs; my view is that it is a very different issue if someone famous is used for their expertise.  A good example from my perspective was that model Lily Cole recently donated her time to the World Land Trust to model the Emeralds used in the Gemfields Emerald Jewellery auction that raised funds for our Elephant corridor project. We can put a value on this donation (and will, and we will record it in our Annual Report), because it does actually have a market value. But if  a pop star shows up to a charity event how much is that worth to the charity? And how much is it worth to the pop star?

I was horrified to learn that some charities apparently pay celebs to attend their events. In fact I find this difficult to believe – so if any of the inhabitants of cyberspace know more about this practice, I think quite a few of us in the charity sector would be interested to know more about it. My feeling is that if charities do pay celebs to endorse them, or attend events, then the ordinary man and woman in the street would be horrified their donations were being spent that way.  Any facts and figures?

This at first sight seems very interesting. People are much more aware of cancer charities than World Wildlife Fund for instance (or WWF as it prefers to be rebranded as). But is this really true or for that matter of any importance? It is a bit like saying people are more aware of hospitals than vets or undertakers, or more aware of steam trains than books, autistic children or retired soldiers (all of which have charities associated with them). However, the person who has a pet, or whose father has just died, or has had a connection with  or interest in any of those mentioned  will almost certainly have a very different perspective.

In theory, as the CEO of a charity,  brand awareness should be very important to me. But in the way this report describes it, it simply is not important or relevant. I am only really interested in how aware our target audience is. Our target audience probably does not include a large part of the general public.

A random  sample of the public will tell me very little. But a sample of, say, the National Trust membership visiting a nature reserve, or a sample of the RSPB membership, and knowing how many of them are aware of the WLT, now that might be helpful.

The bottom line is that if an organisation is doing well, then surveys, particularly random surveys, have very little value, but like so much of modern society’s activities, there are jobs at stake.   Corporate branding was to me one of the great cons of the latter part of the 20th century. And it now appears that researching that branding is another way of squeezing money from charities.

Do you think that researching the branding of charities is important? Let us know.

But the Elephant in the Room that is rarely mentioned is human populations.  Burgeoning human populations with ever increasing economic expectations cannot be sustained. Our Patron, Sir David Attenborough has made a TV programme about it. To anyone with a modicum of scientific training and a  passing knowledge of economics it is blatantly obvious that the real crisis has yet to come, and as has been described in the past, it is a bomb, and the fuse has been lit.

So the Royal Society, the great bastion of the Scientific Establishment in Britain has set up an enquiry. According to a recent press release:

” The UK’s Royal Society is launching a major study into human population growth and how it may affect social and economic development in coming decades. The world’s population has risen from two billion in 1930 to 6.8 billion now, with nine billion projected by 2050. The society acknowledges it is delving into a hugely controversial area, but says a comprehensive and scientific review of the evidence is needed.”

So it’s the usual response to a crisis: form a committee and do more research.  Meanwhile the crisis deepens, and the politicians will go to their cabinet meetings, subsidise a few wind turbines, and ignore the elephant that is sitting in the room.

A report in Third Sector Magazine this week supports my view.  According to the Fundraising Standards Board (also not one of my favourites, see my previous post) the highest proportion of complaints about charities related to street fundraisers, followed by telephone fundraisers, door to door and direct mail. And these are all fundraising methods that the WLT has resisted using.

My view is that all these methods involve a degree of pressure, and we do not want supporters recruited in this way. A supporter who joins in because they have made a fully informed, unpressurised choice is in my view, far more likely to stay loyal.

This has been backed up by our experience during the economic recession. Personal recommendation and the news media spreading the word are the most important methods for fundraising for the WLT. I can’t claim that the recsession  has not impacted us. It surely has, since our income for the first six months of this year has  only just about been equal to that of 2009; but at least it has not declined, and the number of individual supporters signing up monthly direct debits has actually increased.

So keep spreading the word. You, my readers, and your friends are worth any number of street fundraisers.

A high profile event such as Elephant Parade obviously has fairly high overheads. Even so, taking into account that even those overheads produced a significant increase in public awareness, there is little doubt that the whole project achieved a huge success.

Meanwhile there is an ongoing need for funds. If you weren’t able to afford an elephant, but would like to do your bit, why not go to the online donation form, where you can donate as little or as much as you like.  It will all help, and we will keep you informed as to where the money is spent.

This was provoked by reading a summary of the complaints received by the Board. In 2009 it received 5000 complaints about direct mail, 2000 complaints about telephone fundraising, and another 2000 about door to door fundraising. And these are all methods of fundraising that the WLT does not use.  It also had over 1000 complaints about data protection, but again, since the WLT does not pass on to third parties any of its supporters’ data, we are unlikely to get complaints. So that is it, in a nutshell.

We don’t actually do most of the things that the FRSB was set up to regulate, and we believe that on the whole the standards we set ourselves are as high or higher than those of the FRSB, so why waste our supporters’ money to get a logo on our website (it would cost £300-£400)?

But does the lack of the FRSB logo on our website have a negative impact – has it stopped anyone making  donations? That is far more difficult to ascertain, so any feedback and comments from our supporters would be very welcome.