[cotega]

I hope this doesn't sound like preaching.

In almost every discussion about charities and non-profits the main discussion seems to revolve around the money we donate and how efficiently charities use these donations. One thing that I find people forgetting is how valuable their time can be to non-profits and how that often is way more valuable than donations. Each one of you on HN certainly has a skill that would be valuable to charities (especially small ones) whether that be technical help or in taking your skills in finding customers for your startup and applying those skills to fundraising for the non-profits. You would be surprised at how limited many non-profits are in these areas and how even an hour here and there each month can make a huge impact.

I realize many of you just don't have the time and I am not suggesting this is for everyone. However, if you do, try sending a quick email to the director of a non-profit you find interesting and you might be surprised at how happy they are to hear from you.

[nostromo]

The primary thing most nonprofits need is money. Here, I'll give you an example:

My mom ran a branch of Habitat for Humanity for a while. People universally loovvee Habitat. People were constantly volunteering, which is great! However, most of the time, there just is no work to be done by volunteers.

The primary thing Habitat needs is land and construction materials (which usually means: money).

People were sometimes upset about being turned away... but unless they could donate land, money, or construction supplies, there just wasn't much unmet need for general laborers.

[zanny]

I think you point a more systemic issue in the modern world. It isn't just in non-profits, there is a general lack of land, money, and construction supplies. First world infrastructure crumbles not due to a lack of unskilled labor to set to paving streets with vehicles, it is a lack of those vehicles for people to drive, and a lack of money to push politicians to allow it.

I'm not well versed at all in the problem, but I see it as a major one - there needs to be some major innovations in materials extraction and distribution to enable a next generation deployment of machinery to make the next round of renovation globally possible. And there is just no one picking up supply to meet that demand, mainly because while people want to fix all the broken infrastructure and build nations on new roads and proper housing, there is just no machinery to meet the demand, and no money to pay for it.

[mjn]

I can believe that's true for Habitat For Humanity, but not all charities have the same bottlenecks. My mom co-runs a branch of Meals on Wheels, and the main thing they're constantly short on is volunteers.

[cadlin]

I have a fair bit of domain experience, and I'm going to disagree with the other people who have responded to you and argue that volunteering time is often more helpful than donating money. The efficacy of time vs. money is context-dependent and one is not better than the other.

1) How much money are we talking here? An extra thousand dollars would be meaningful to a small organization, but $50 is not going to make a difference. Something like Habitat for Humanity has thousands of people donating $50, but small organizations don't, and are constrained by lack of man hours as opposed to money.

2) Not every organization worth helping is a non-profit. Local community groups are often not non-profits or any sort of official organization at all. Once again, just because Habitat for Humanity is inundated with volunteers doesn't mean your local group investigating police corruption is.

3) Many organizations don't know how to use volunteers. This is partially because volunteers are notoriously unreliable, but it's also because most groups don't have outlets for self-motivated volunteers. These volunteers have to "create a position" for themselves, and if they're motivated enough to help but not motivated to define their jobs then they'll just lose interest and drop out.

4) A lot of organizations are composed entirely of volunteers. They might need money for something like webhosting, but they probably also need people to perform basic tasks like research or website administration. Unless you are giving the group enough money to hire a full-time staff member or something similar, there are severe limits on the marginal utility of a dollar.

5) To reiterate, not every non-profit/organization is Habitat for Humanity. There are a lot of smaller ones that need help an do good work.

[apsec112]

"One thing that I find people forgetting is how valuable their time can be to non-profits and how that often is way more valuable than donations."

This is not what I've heard from everyone I know who runs a nonprofit. See:

http://blog.givewell.org/2008/11/12/is-volunteering-just-a-s... http://blog.givewell.org/2011/07/13/a-good-volunteer-is-hard...

http://lesswrong.com/lw/uk/beyond_the_reach_of_god/tca

and especially: http://lesswrong.com/lw/65/money_the_unit_of_caring/

"Yes, people are sometimes limited in their ability to trade time for money (underemployed), so that it is better for them if they can directly donate that which they would usually trade for money. If the soup kitchen needed a lawyer, and the lawyer donated a large contiguous high-priority block of lawyering, then that sort of volunteering makes sense—that's the same specialized capability the lawyer ordinarily trades for money. But "volunteering" just one hour of legal work, constantly delayed, spread across three weeks in casual minutes between other jobs? This is not the way something gets done when anyone actually cares about it, or to state it near-equivalently, when money is involved."