Everything Everywhere stops plundering the charity box

Everything Everywhere has suspended its practice of taking 10 per cent of charitable donations, and claims it is now working on an alternative, and more sustainable, model. EE had been taking the cut from text donations to cover its costs, other than those charities selected as "partners" by the operator. The operator still …

[Anonymous Coward]

STANDARD NETWORK CHARGE

For every text service I've seen the small print states exactly what you as the customer will be charged:

"£xxx plus your standard network charge"

How can any network possibly claim they need to charge more than the standard network charge to process the text?

[Gangsta]

surprise surprise...

who would have thunk it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most Charities are glorified employment agencies

Most charities today are run to just keep people employed from what I can tell. One example I could give would be the American Red Cross who's CEO get over half a million dollars a year and who's entire operation has a 97% running cost. Meaning that out of every penny donated, 97% is used up and 3% gets to were it was indeended by the donator. This is true of alot fo charities and I would dare say that nigerian scammers already moved into the charitie racked long ago as a way to make money by giving themselfs well paid noisless jobs paid for by donations.

Not all charaties are like that but people before you donate anything fiscaly - do your research and you will probably find that putting out the bins for the old lady over the road gives more positive results than your few pennies a month that actualoy make it thru all the internal taxation alot of charities impose either directly or indirectly.

Go donate to the local church roof, even if yoru a athiest you can at least see the appeal of one building you can escape into were you wont get a signal due to all that granite and lead.

I would like for all charities to be to be at the level that the public percieve and yet only few achieve. How much of your donation gets to the intended destination, that is one question that realy needs to be asked.

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldnt agree more

Some of them even employ armies of lawyers. I once organised a charity 24 bike ride, which quite clearly stated that donations would be split 50/50 between Save the Children and a.n. other.

Save the childrens lawyers got on to us saying that we couldnt do that. If their name was being used they had to have all the money. Absolute shits. Net result, have never given since, and will never give to Save the Children. Or any other charity that spends honestly donated funds on pond life lawyers.

Anonymous? Theyre shits those lawyers.

[Ted Treen]

You're so right.

For a definition of modern organised charity, refer to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.

For those who don't know, and can't be arsed to Google, Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself.

Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent.

The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.

[Anonymous Coward]

you're right

And as a resident of Oxford, I recently decided to stop donating to Oxfam until they can at least learn to save some money by turning their bloody lights off at night.

[heyrick]

@ PXG

That's quite an accusation re. The American Red Cross. The causes they are raising money for only get 3¢ of each dollar? WTF?!

Do you have any links to docs to back this up?

[heyrick]

Repentant? Or just afraid of the bad publicity?

At the prices demanded for texts (go on, work it out per megabyte), you'd have thought they could offer charity ones for - gasp - free.

My parents are not with EE, but for my provider, costs have never apparently been a factor in the junk texts they get about changing their phone/plan/etc. At least my provider is quieter, only got one this month, something about Disney Channel (over 3G, on a phone, with screwed up aspect ratio, at a bitrate that would make a grown geek cry...). I am, however, expecting a lot coming up to contract renewal time. And, funny, these ones are free...

As should be charity offerings. Either do it or don't get involved, it isn't difficult.

[Anonymous Coward]

How come?

How come it costs nothing to collect money for their "partners" (read: high profile charities) but it costs money to collect money for smaller charities? Or can we read it that they hoped that if they did it free for the big charities nobody would notice the small ones?

I think the bigger point here is that they are ignoring the word "charity". Their customers are giving the money to charity, what's so bad about EE giving a little too by waiving the cost of the transaction. Even the big nasty banks don't charge for charitable donations.

And then there's the publicity. I can't believe they didn't spot that giving free services to charity is good publicity.

[DR]

I think that you misunderstand

it doesn't cost nothing to accept donations from their partner charities.

they still need to run servers, employ staff and still get charged processing fees by the banks for the funds that they collect.

but for the bigger charities they waive the fee's then cross charge them to the smaller customers... because politically it's easier to say that you support charities, you collected all the money for comic relief and did it all with a charitable spirit costing the charity nothing... then don't say that you just charged a smaller charity more because of that.

that's why comic relief get charged nothing, and a smaller charity are getting charged 10%,

if you consider that a large charity like comic relief is making greater use of the equipment, the large events means that staff are probably working on standby rather than on call through the night (to make sure that the system doesn't fall over) and cost more because of that it seems unfair to not charge them!

If they charged everyone fee's to process their donation -i.e if every charity or organisation were to pay their own way fairly, then the processing fee could probably fall to a much lower percentage anyway... (so 1% of all donations rather than 10% of a tenth of the donations)

and to all the posts above saying it's a charity, I don't do any business with EE, but if I did, why should my service charge go up to support a load of charities whose cause I may not even agree with?

[DB2k]

unbelieveable

Even if they for some reason think that passing an SMS through an existing SMSc to an existing large account, and do some existing billing process, costs more than the standard SMS, to say that processing say a £1 donation costs more than a £5 donation is insane.

[Jason Bloomberg]

Thieving bastards

I personally think all providers should drop the network charge for charity donations completely and pocket that 'loss' themselves ( the goodwill will gain more than the loss, and they can probably mostly write that off as 'charity' themselves ) but EE takes the biscuit.

It's as offensive as skimming 10% having waved a collection tin around.

[DR]

ok

it still costs to send a message.

You chose to donate via text, why should I pay for a part of a message that you chose to send to a charity.

what charity did you donate to? do I even support their cause?

the network charge is there, oddly enough because you chose to make use of their network to get your business done.