they've not really answered one of the main criticisms which was their crappy spending. They've put up a pie chart of what they spend money on but that was already public knowledge. The actual criticism was on average US charities manage to spend 90% of their money on actual aid. The pie chart might fool simpletons but 10% of what they earn being spent on tshirts and clothing is pretty shitty and only 37% on aid (and i'd bet that year has their highest aid %). Along with generally everything else. I'd like to see a side by side comparison with someone like the red cross.
I thpught they rebuked that quite well, he states that around 80% goes towards the three main ambitions of the cause, which isn't simply projects in Uganda.
A large part of their cause is obviously, getting the word out, as the very premise of the campaign is to make this man famous. Add up the following pieces then which I feel can be justified for this:
- CA programmes: 37.14%
- Awareness Programmes: 25.98%
- Awareness Products: 9.56%
- Media and Film production: 7.87%
This leaves you with a rough spending of just over 80% of all revenue. Obviously as the Management and fundraising panels have no greater breakdown this can be left out, but either way, there will undoubtedly be large costs involved with both aspects (especially as this is largely a US based organisation where costs will be far higher than if they were located in say Africa).
Even if 50% of this final 20% of all revenue was being spent badly, end of the day you have somewhere close to the 90% which you are saying for the Red Cross.
This still doesn't drive me to donate, but it somewhat answers the problems that people were throwing at them. The very reason why this campaign has gotten so incredibly large is directly because of the Awareness spending and Media production which accounts for the 43.5% of their spending, atop the 37% spent on direct work.
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