Many people working at charities want to do good. That's great! But unfortunately, this desire to do good makes it easy to rationalize dishonesty.
Think of it like this: if exaggerating a few marketing claims brings in more donations — and those donations allow the charity to save more lives — exaggeration can start to feel like the ethical choice. The alternative, after all, is fewer lives being saved by the charity.
However, there's a key problem with this: donations are a limited resource.
Consider a donor who is trying to decide where to donate $100. The donor finds two charities online:
Based on this, the donor donates $100 to Charity B, and Charity B is happy because now they have more money to help animals.
But think about what actually happened here — instead of an honest charity getting $100 to help animals, a dishonest charity is getting $100 to help animals.
This leaves us with an important question: is it better for the world if we fund honest charities, or dishonest charities?
The problem also doesn't stop at impact claims. If a charity is willing to lie about those, they may also be willing to lie about other things — including whether donations go towards animals, or towards employee perks and executive salaries.
Lying doesn't just inflate one statistic. It destroys the ability of donors to trust what a charity claims.
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