Action Aid’s is pushing their child sponsorship programme with a typically emotional claim that the smiling child plastered on the front (did she know she was going to end up in tens of thousands of papers?) will ‘make you proud one day’.

Considering the prevalence of this kind of fundraising I’m assuming it makes plenty of money for the charities who use it but it makes me pretty uncomfortable and I’m not sure it’s actually very helpful.

Shouldn’t charities be working to find (or provide) sustainable, long term solutions to poverty? Not only is this kind of fundraising deeply patronising to ‘these poor people’ but it treats donors in the UK like idiots incapable of being talked to as grown ups.

Charities shouldn’t be treating the people they work with as commodities however ‘helpful’ the outcomes might be. And we certainly shouldn’t be told we should give to charity in return for pictures drawn by a ‘courageous’ child. It worries me that charities think that they have to sink to communicating with broadsheet-reading (in this case the Guardian) adults in this way. Is the British public so devoid of empathy that they have to have a personal relationship with a child before they are willing to hand over a few quid a month?

For me there is far more value in treating grown up issues in a grown up way. There have been plenty of charity campaigns which successfully explained complex issues quickly and effectively without treating potential supporters like children. I hope Action Aid wake up to this. You can’t offset your guilt or responsibility with this kind of ‘quick fix’. It doesn’t work.

And don’t even get me started on the charities that let you go and visit your sponsored child…

[By the way, the ad is also a very poorly designed by Action Aid's usually high standards. I wonder if they offset their own guilt by not even doing this stuff in-house.]

Picked up a copy of the Big Issue for the first time in ages yesterday. Don’t know why I don’t buy it more often to be honest – it usually has more to say for itself than most newspapers…

Inside I found perhaps the bulkiest charity insert I’ve ever received. No less than 5 pieces of paper (including 2 envelopes) were included. The message on the first envelope was compelling enough to make me open it – though since I’m in the business professional curiosity might have got the better of me – and start to wade through the content. I found the letter from the Director General of Help the Aged (DG? Really? I thought only the BBC had one of those) which told me that I had ‘probably already gathered that the letter was about loneliness’.

Actually I hadn’t because there was so much to wade through that I’d missed the central piece – a Christmas card featuring a picture of a Christmas tree with only one bauble on it. Actually a really nice bit of creative that has unfortunately been lost in a sea of paper.

Now, I’m all for detail and transparency and I appreciate that not every campaign can be summed up in a few words but this all seemed a bit much to me. I think people need something to concentrate on and I can’t understand why Help the Aged didn’t think to include the details in their letter in the Christmas card flyer. All this succeeded in doing was confusing me.

Also in the pack is a direct debit form and an envelope to put it in. Again, these are obviously vital but why not combine the two or (if it must be included) add them on to the letter so that there’s only two pieces of paper to deal with. Chances are people are either going to lose some vital part of the package or just give up reading (as I did) because it just looks like too much hard work.

A shame really because it’s a great charity and a great cause. The campaign website (which isn’t even mentioned in the letter and is buried on the back of the card) is a much better implementation and can be found at www.saddestnumber.org.uk