Are charities that desperate for our money?

I answered the door once to the RSPCA and he didn't want to take no for a answer ,eventually I had to be rude after 15 minutes as I don't want to take out a direct debit..I thought this kind of tactic was banned though  

I've noticed an upsurge in the direct debit tactic. It's normally dogs or some animal to entice the kids to stop, then its a DD hard sell.

No problems with doing DD for a charity, but I like to choose the charity, not get the hard sell.

Maybe a sign of the times. My more cynical side does think there seems to be an explosion in tiny charities, most of them started by genuine conviction or a need to do something positive, maybe after losing a loved one. But a lot have no idea what they are doing, and money raised is wasted or frittered away due to inexperience or incompetence.

Surely it would be better to put your motivation and efforts into an existing charity and help them.

Then you see bigger charities having turf wars. My charity of choice is the Air Ambulance Service, which operates the national Childrens Air Ambulance, and Air Ambulance for Warwickshire, Northamptonshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Rutland.

Why this isn't a national service, centrally funded, economies of scale blah blah is another argument. But they get no government funding, so it is (wrongly) funded by donations. Then you get the West Midlands Air Ambulance fund raising descending on Warwickshire, and rattling their tins and setting up stalls outside the big supermarkets. The unsuspecting public then donate, thinking they are supporting their local Air Ambulance, not Birmingham's.

I don't knock some of the amazing work done by charities, but there does seem to be so much overlap and duplication with multiple groups championing the same causes.

No wonder they get so competitive for our spare change...

Have very mixed feelings about charities and being charitable. I tend to donate to anything animal or forces related, local cancer campaigns. And tend to avoid anything with a Go Fund Me Page and the guy who spends every evening sitting on the forecourt of the local petrol station asking for spare change, Only to return to reading his book once you've ignored him... I avoid donating to anything African on the basis that this country is rich in resources such as oil and minerals as well as the tourism industry, the rest of the world have been donating to this country my entire life. I also live within a high African community and see them driving around in their new 4 x 4s and BMW's many of them also are multiple property owners over here. So when I see an advert on television asking me to donate 'just £2 a month' so poor Johnny can have clean water to drink.... It kind of gets my back up as to why 'poor Johnny's' fellow countrymen have not sorted this basic problem out themselves after all these years. 

We do get sucked into these charitable causes because of the clever marketing and they all end up becoming a never ending cycle. A quick search on Google will tell you that in the UK there are 195,289 registered charities in the UK raising over £80billion per year..... That alone would suggest that the majority of it, is just an industry.

Anything health related in the UK i.e. air ambulances, cancer research should be funded by the NHS via the tax payer. After all anyone of us could although hopefully not require there services one day. I don't think the police helicopter that regularly hovers above my house at 3am in the morning for an hour at a time is funded by charity...