This Holiday Season, How About a Little Fun With Your Giving?

Holidays are the time to reflect, be with loved ones and look out for others. But why do all the messages of your favorite causes and charities have to be so serious?

We asked ourselves this question when developing a holiday fundraising campaign for the David Suzuki Foundation, a charitable organization that does leading environmental work on climate change and species protection worldwide.

Now don't get me wrong. It's not that climate change, or other social causes that I have received e-blasts for this holiday season (poverty reduction, clean water, education for girls in developing countries) is any laughing matter. Far from it. But why must they be so earnest?

Charity Ratings Kill Innovation

This may be blasphemy but I am going to say it. Charity ratings help to kill innovation. Now before the charity ratings organizations go crazy and tell me how wrong I am, let me acknowledge a few things.

I am not against charity ratings. They play a valuable role in terms of evaluating efficiency, accountability and transparency. But they seem too focused on expense ratios and not enough on impact. If an organization's program spending relative to their operating spending is 70/30 but has a huge impact on health care or climate change, is that worthy of a lower rating to another organization that has an 85/15 ratio but far less impact? But let's leave this argument for another time.

My problem with charity ratings is that by focusing on the relative spend between mission (program) and operating, charities are reluctant (some are even scared) to spend money on innovating the way they engage the public.