The best you can hope for is efficiency in what they spend the money on. Donating to a charity that donates to another charity after deducting its cost seems rather inefficiennt. Particularly when the turnover is circa £30k and there are fees of 8k and costs of 4k.
This is what the BBC do and it is indicative of the overall trend. If you look into how the money is funnelled, they take the bulk donations and they allocate a certain percentage of it to their nominated cause, the rest is held in their bank to collect interest.
Source:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/5ShlK3DH4J6XyLMXXTw355h/frequently-asked-questions-faq
Latest accounts here :
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/tv/pudsey/CIN_Appeal_Accounts_YE15_v7.pdf
The accounting habits of the charity came to light in 2014 (I believe) when the DM ran an article claiming the BBC is stashing huge sums of public donations. Source :
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...investment-portfolio-instead-handing-out.html
Notice that on the BBC website they have posted a question attempting to address this :
''I've seen a media article claiming that you're holding back funds? Is this true?''
Notice that's not technically how the question is answered:
''No. BBC Children in Need does not hold large sums of uncommitted funds.'' -- not what was actually asked.
So they admit to holding money, they say it is released slowly to charities over 3 years (fair enough) but they do technically hold funds and they do use those funds to make interest which is not allocated to charitable causes I would assume?
''All other costs not attributable to grant making are covered by investment income and gift aid''
When you look into those 'other costs' that's when things can look rather worrying. It's the bells and whistles syndrome you see in most large organisations which you allude to there.
''Our Chief Executive’s salary is £115,000''
Is another red flag, in my opinion. Although nobody should be expected to work for nothing, except the majority of the volunteers of course..
Having said all that I think this is a commonality amongst large fund raising organisations.
You see managers on quite large sums of money but the bulk head of the organisation is run by those recieving no pay.
We know that Terry Wogan recieved payment to host the programme so it's likely to assume many other host's do as well, and there's a whole infrastructure that goes into making the programme. The cost of actually putting on the programme must be at least half a million pounds I would think, estimated guess?
It could be argued that without the exposure of children in need these charities would not even recieve a fraction of the funding that they do get, if anything at all. This is a fair statement but the same could be said about local authorities. Is it fair that certain services are not available due to 'funding' when managerial pay, bureaucracy and ineffciency accounts for a growing proportion of what is raised in revenue?
But yeah, I think most organisations like this do operate a sort of layer cake system where money is continually changing hands and everyone in the process of that is taking a little bit. I'm not saying it's bad I'm not saying it's good I'm saying that's the reality of it. Charities do function as businesses much in the same way that government does. That's an irrevocable truth.