John Linton
..try seeing how hard it can be to give a dollar (or $20,000 a month) away.
As Exetel has 'consolidated' it's grip on some sort of meaningful 'longevity' as a commercial entity and as this is, or some claim it used to be, the "season of good will" we have been looking at making some meaningful contribution to the country we live in and/or the planet generally. Obviously commercial entities aren't set up for philanthropic purposes but small companies like Exetel are run by people who are very close to their businesses but have views outside the narrow confines of the daily commercial grind.
While Annette and I were in the UK earlier this year we came across some of the fauna protection programs and species 'revival/re-introdction programs in that country and were very moved and impressed by what we saw. On returning to Australia we saw some programs on TV that focussed on similar programs being run in a variety of countries including New Zealand.
In our own ways we are very fond of anmals and birds and we both contribute to various charities that are devoted to, in our opinion, very worthwhile programs and activities - one of these is the WWF (no - not wrestling.) Over the past few months we began to look at ways in which we could leverage the efficiencies and abilities that have been built to develop and grow Exetel in ways other than they are currently used for.
One of the things we do very efficiently is bill and collect money from our customers. It occurred to us that most charitable organisations require fairly significant amounts when seeking donations which are beyond the 'comfort zone' for many people. One idea we had was to explore the possibility of asking our customers to make a monthly donation of an 'almost meaningless' amount of money of itself (say 50 cents) which if multiplied by, say, 40,000 contributing customers would amount to $A20,000 each month which could be added to their bill and automatically deducted from their bank account/credit card each month and then paid as a single amount of money to one or more 'save this Australian species' programs.
Another thing is we have over 350,000 unique vistors to our web site each month and certainly a proportion of those people would look at information about topics other than communications.
We considered matching the donations one a 1:1 basis and therefore being able to significantly assist one or more sensible programs. We also considered a variety of ways we could provide added services in return for the donations (such as free SMS or FAX or downloads) at some 2:1 value to the amount donated to maybe encourge donations of greater than a few cents.
All well and good - or so we thought.
So I sent a few emails to organisations I thought would find some extra donations useful to their protection of animal activities and, eventually, got some replies by email asking me to call to discuss what could be achieved. How very disillusioning calling some of these organisations turned out to be. I'm clearly deluded in my beliefs that organisations set up to help the helpless are staffed by dedicated altruists whose sole purpose in giving their time for the legendary pittance to such organisations is to ensure that their programs are adequately funded as quickly as possible. I pictured such people as being long on compassion and caring and relatively short on commercial acumen or avarice hunched over their telephones in their 10 year old anoraks and jeans wearing their mended with sticky tape glasses (sort of like John Lennon after a bad few days with Yoko).
As I haven't met any of the people I've talked to face to face that may well be the case but they sure don't sound like that over the phone.
I was taken aback by the casual, in some cases closer to dismissive, replies I got to offering what I thought was relatively significant monthly donations - by no means huge but I would have thought $A20,000 plus a month would be considered as useful. To date I've contacted four organisations, three of whom thanked me for my enquiry and they would get back to me (yet to hear from them again) and one who after expressing some interest told me they couldn't accept any donations from us because a large telecommunications company donates to them and has a veto on who they can accept money from which included a company like Exetel.
So......if you know a very reputable organisation dedicated to protecting native flora and fauna which would actually take our 'tainted' money perhaps you'd let me know?
I wouldn't want to have to look outside Australia.