Athoned Out

I've been meaning to write something about the plethora of fundraising walk/ride/run marathons for awhile, and several things trigger me today; Bob / low_fat_muffin's announcement of his participation in an AIDS marathon (go Bob!), a story about campaign finance "bundlers" in the WSJ, the Girl Scout cookies we have left over months after excessor bought a bunch to support a friend, and an ethics question in the WSJ about whether a boss who enters such a fundraising endeavor is improperly pressuring employees by requesting donations.

All of these things began as small-scale, amateurish efforts to provide a little extra money for a good cause while giving participants a chance to enjoy a community effort. As they have become institutionalized and professional, and as more and more of them have been created, the market for this kind of extended fundraising outreach has been saturated. We have given to a half-dozen friends in the past few years, and while we love to support them, it's all becoming a little much as the amounts they want to raise increase and the pressure to show you are a good member of the community by giving more and more rises, sometimes reaching the extortionate (as in the case of the boss who will clearly think of you as not supporting him if you don't pledge support for his participation.)

We are happy to donate large amounts of cash to be spent in current good causes; we give heavily to Lambda Legal, for example, which also uses a lot of peer pressure and networking to raise its money. But the money goes directly to the work. In the case of these marathons, there is often a profitmaking company that has been authorized to run the event in the name of the charity, and only a fraction of the amount raised will actually go to the charitable organization. Finding out what this fraction is for a particular event can be hard.

With my financial planning hat on, I think all but the wealthiest among us should give small amounts to directly support community efforts, but would be wiser to fulfill charitable impulses by giving time and attention to people they know who need it. Unless you are sure you won't be a burden on someone else in your old age, death is the best time of all for donating large sums of cash. But maybe I'm just an old fogey.

Almost every participatory fundraising event I have ever seen would do much more for the charity if the participants did the same number of hours of their normal paid work and just gave the cash over. It might not have the same sense of group action and it might not be as fun, but having MBAs and doctors, say, collecting trash along the roadside as a feel-good environmental effort makes no sense and gives them a false sense of having paid their dues, sort of like how conspicuous consumers recycle a few cans and bottles and get their piety gene satisfied while never examining their wasteful overconsumption. Like any religious ritual, it does little but gives you the sense of being a good person while you ignore people around you that need your time and help.

Modern fundraising events are parasitic on the egos of the participants, fulfilling their need to achieve and have meaning in their life, but wasting much of the effort and time expended on overhead and organizer's salaries.

[This is why economists are not popular at parties...]