Value for money

One of the hardest things for a small charity like ours is to raise sufficient funds to keep all our projects going and allow us to further expand. Most larger charities employ at least one full time fundraiser or a fundraising team, and they will have a significant budget for advertising and publicity. Of course all this costs a significant amount to set up and get running before they start to realise the benefits of doing this. In addition, the overheads of the charity will increase considerably to fund this ongoing commitment to fund raising. Which all makes the decision whether to employ professional fundraisers a difficult balance against best value for our supporters.

We at Vision Africa are probably sitting at that point where we are raising as much as we can through our existing methods and support base. This means we are probably doing as much as we can with our resources in Kenya without going down the route of putting the charity on a more professional footing in the UK. However, one of our key 'selling points' to our supporters is our low overheads of less than 2% of our income. We can only do this because all our UK staff are part time volunteers who work for Vision Africa in their spare time, motivated by a heart of compassion for the children in Africa which we support.

So, why have I focused on this at this time? Well, quite by chance I was reading the annual report of another charity with similar aims to our own earlier this week. What struck me was they had raised something like four times the amount that we raised in the same period, but their overheads were about 35% of their income on a like for like comparison. In addition when I looked at their stated achievements for the year I immediately had the feeling that they had actually achieved somewhat less than us.

Now of course, that is not a fair statement based on a ten minute reading of their annual report. However, it did make me think about the future for Vision Africa. We are immensely pleased with the considerable achievements we have made with our limited resources. But, can we go on to continue to achieve considerably more without changing our model? I think not personally when I look back at the struggle we've had over the past year to raise the funds we need. It's an interesting and difficult dilemma.

Perhaps for now the answer is that we need more UK volunteers to fund raise for us. There is so much we want to do, and so much need and want out there. It would be a shame to have to break our 'virtual charity' model which keeps our overheads so low, but does the need justify changing the model to raise more funds? Put another way, do the ends justify the means? Answers on a postcard please!