If you donate to donkey charities, you want the money to go on…
Donkeys.
Hay, specifically
Is that so unreasonable?
You saw the donkeys. You felt something. You gave money so the donkeys could eat.
The idea that your donation might instead fund a long-term strategy to help the sanctuary understand social value procurement frameworks is, at best, confusing, and at worst, a betrayal of the original donation.
But, if there is no plan, and donations don’t cover the hay anymore, then eventually the charity ceases to exist. And what happens to the donkeys?
Melodramatic? Sure. A real issue. You bet.
Why Social Value is the solution, and currently, the problem.
A significant amount of public money has been tied to something called social value. The principle is sound: when public bodies commission services, contractors should demonstrate benefit to the community, not just delivery of the contract.
A building firm winning a council tender should be doing something good beyond the building. Seems fair.
The issue is that the actual organisation delivering the social value is, in most cases, a charity. And charities, by and large, have not been told this, trained for this, or funded to do this. They are the product in a marketplace they did not know existed.
So companies with contracts to fulfil are throwing money at charities in lumps, quickly, without strategic intent, because they need a box ticked.
The charity, desperate for any funding, accepts it. The money arrives fast and disappears faster. Nothing sustainable is built. The donkeys get hay for one season.
Meanwhile, the charity has not developed the language, the processes, or the products to engage with social value as a repeatable revenue stream.
They do not know what a TOMS is, and haven’t built a connector between what they do and what a procurement officer needs to evidence. They are still, in their hearts, fundraising.
Asking nicely. Hoping.
To be absolutely clear here, the charities are not the villains here, but they are the ones who need to change.
Not because the system is fair, or because the government has resourced this properly. And certainly not because the companies commissioning social value genuinely care about outcomes. Some do, but most care about fulfilling their contract.
The reason why charities need to change is because the alternative is to keep doing what is not working, which is waiting for the system to become more humane while the sector slowly starves.
What can we do
Here’s a simple list that requires actual support and funding:
look at what procurement needs and build something that delivers it, cleanly, evidenced, priced properly.
Don’t walk into the room as a beggar but as a supplier. Charities in this scenario are not begging. They are selling something that is genuinely in demand
The donkey sanctuary that survives the next ten years is not the one that wrote the most affecting newsletter. It is the one that worked out what a corporate partner actually needs and built a product around it, so that the hay is funded not by one-off donations but by a contract that renews.
That is not a betrayal of the mission. It is the mission, sustained. The hay still matters. But so does still being here to buy it.
