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by awaythrow98765 1144 days ago
Amnesty International is primarily an advertisement and donation collection business. Most of your donations go straight into advertisements and collecting more donations. Collectors aren't volunteers but hired professional collection agencies/con-artists trained to guilt people out of their money.

AI using AI for misrepresentations fits my very low opinion of them.
1 comments
PoignardAzur 1144 days ago
What percentage of its budget does Amnesty International put into advertising, and is it unusually high for charities?

I mean, I'm all for effective altruism, for giving money to charities the charities that help the most people with it with the lowest overhead, and for doing your research before deciding who you donate to (I recommend GiveWell as a starting point); but "hiring PR agents to solicit donations" is hardly unique to Amnesty.

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amtamt 1144 days ago
From https://www.amnesty.org/en/2021-global-financial-report/

> 2021 was a record-breaking year with a total fundraising income of €357m.

And

> The largest proportion of the movement’s programme expenditure €26.4m (35%) was spent towards Goal One.

And

> 45% of total income spent on Human rights research, advocacy, campaigning, raising awareness and education

So ~20% (75m of 357m) was actually spent on real work, assuming everything reached end beneficiaries.

Interesting way of showing 45% of expenditure clubbing multiple heads, while showing 2% expenditure on "Maintaining our democratic system of governance".

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PoignardAzur 1143 days ago
I'm not sure your math holds up, though.

Among other things, it sounds like their income was higher than their expenditures, eg that they had some money left at the end of the year; so your "75m of 375m" ratio isn't quite right.

Maybe I missed something.

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amtamt 1143 days ago
~ for approximately. Idea was not to audit records but provide an approximation of how much is spent on the stated objectives.

And even 20% is probably very high, because I would guess people working on those would be paid some salary/ honorarium, and that also would be included in this expense.

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MichaelZuo 1144 days ago
Yikes, only 20% going to actual end beneficiaries is pretty low.
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