I'm not sure where you get your assumptions from, but UNICEF works in camps and outposts that people come to, often in safer areas to treat refugees and establish aid stations. They don't catapult money/food/water into warring nations and call it a wash.

UNICEF also works on a permissioned basis: They wait until they are asked, and so they often work in countries neighboring crisis centers, where it is much safer anyway. They are constantly negotiating to be "asked", yes, but this is through diplomatic ties. UNICEF works with refugees mostly, not in war zones. For famine/disease intervention, they are at ground zero, but again with permission.

And UNICEF's overhead is low - they are efficient, considering they sometimes have to establish, e.g., their own refueling station networks, cold storage logistics, flight controllers, etc. Often, powerful industrialists in the target nations provide significant help - or at least I know of one case of this.

Here's a good (not perfect) talk on the issue: https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_abou...

I'm close to UNICEF, or was, so I got sneak peaks into some of the problems they deal with. I assure you, "processing" is not a revenue stream for them.

You're thinking of the breast cancer scams. UNICEF is not a charity, they're a logistics organization with nation-state level resources. When Amazon can do it cheaper - they use Amazon. No organization is perfect, but this one is good.

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sfn42 15 hours ago | parent [-]

I was approached on the street by a girl working for a marketing company, wanting me to start a subscription for $20 a month to Save the Children which I think is a pretty well regarded charity. We hit it off and met up later and I asked her about the job. For each person who signs up, she would get about $60. So that's the first three months of my subscription in her pocket. Furthermore, her employer would fly them around the country, staying about 2 weeks in a city, living in hotels and expenses paid. This girl did not even have a home, she lived permanently in hotels paid for by her employer. And of course the employer needs some profit on top, so I'd estimate that's at least like 3-6 more months of my subscription going towards her employer/expenses.

I wonder how many more of these private companies exist to just siphon off these donation streams? The charity itself may be efficient, but how many private companies provide goods and services to them for a healthy profit?

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jvanderbot 13 hours ago | parent [-]

There are many.

But it's reductive to the extreme to

1) group charities as "charities" when large "nonprofit / ngo" term is more suitable.

2) assume that wasteful _free_ money to a charity makes the charity less good. If a third party takes 90% of the money they raise and gives 10% to the charity, then that's free money for the charity. It's deceptive, and they are cutting a huge profit on the back of the good work the charity does, but that does not mean they are complicit, necessarily. The charity would have to sue that third party company to shut them down, and for what? Do reduce their own project budgets and also lose the money?

	▲	Paradigm2020 11 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The charities sign a contract with the third parties unfortunately - eg they have permission from the charity. Here in Europe oxfam for example uses some of these private companies and they get the first year of donations and from the 2nd year it goes to oxfam itself. Apparently the average person cancels donations after 2,5 years so for a zero marketing budget (for oxfam) they make 1.5 year x your donation. When I first found out I was disgusted and some majors in countries in Europe have tried to ban such "paid charity workers"... (They tend to operate near train stations etc.
	▲	sfn42 9 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The third party is working with the charity(or ngo or whatever). The charity is essentially paying them for marketing, using a huge chunk of the money people think they're giving to charity. The charity is complicit in this deception, and the third party presents themselves as volunteers "Hello, I'm with Save the Children, we do bla bla bla look at this picture of a starving child would you be interested in helping us by giving money every month to give this starving child a better life?" They don't tell you they're paid to be there. They don't tell you the first year of payments goes directly to a private company. I looked up Save the Children in some charity index thing a while back and it was listed as something like 94% of the money they receive goes to the stated cause which I doubt includes these marketing costs. You could say this is still worth it because they increase the amount of money the charity receives even if a lot of it goes to the company. But it doesn't seem right to me, not when they deceive people this way.