'Uncharitable' Review – Hits, Misses, and a Call for More Reflection

Dan Pollatta in "Uncharitable" (2023). Image: Abramorama

I had the good fortune of watching the new Dan Palotta documentary, Uncharitable, recently.

Off the bat, I’m pretty sure that I’m not the target audience for this film. And I understand that documentaries like this, which exist to push a clear agenda, need to make simplified arguments. I watched it with my partner whose background is in film making and health, and she thought that there were plenty of good points raised. However, if you are someone who has thought a lot about charities and how they can be more effective, then like me, you may finish the documentary feeling a little disappointed.

Overall though, I get the feeling that this documentary will resonate with a lot of people.

Here are three things I think the documentary gets right, and three things it gets wrong.

What Uncharitable gets right

1) Overheads are a myth

The documentary does a great job of explaining why focussing on overheads as a way to judge charities is limited. If the filmmakers' one hope is to change the public’s opinion on this topic, then I think it has achieved this.

After all, if you raise the topic of charities to someone in the general public, the first question they have is often - “how much of my donation actually goes to the cause?”. The film does a good job of meeting the public where they’re at.

2) Charities are faced with unrealistic times frames

The documentary states that charities are expected to produce ambitious results in short time frames (24 to 36 months). It makes the comparison with for-profit entities such as Uber, who took 14 years to become profitable. While this comparison with for-profit companies is misguided (more on this later), I do agree that charities are expected to deliver results in time frames that are too short.

As a result, the work that charities do is not only limited in impact, but unimaginative in scope.

3) Charities aren’t encouraged to take risks

Unlike for-profit startups, which are encouraged to try and fail, charities are expected to succeed 100% of the time. There’s less tolerance over how donor money is used, and hence less tolerance for risk.

This is a very good point, and one that stifles innovation in the non profit sector. It means we only ever play it safe, and repeat the same types of activities over and over again. It also means that charities haven’t evolved their structure in decades, despite the world changing rapidly around them.

It was at this point that I thought we might see the film go deeper, to explore what charities could and should be.

However, the film provided a one sided view of charities as undeniably good. This reminded me of one of the key myths of the charity world, which I explore in my book, Redundant Charities – the idea that “Something is better than nothing”.

The film does little to dispel this myth. It simply assumes that all charity efforts - from Kony 2012, to Charity: Water - are all doing good work. And it assumes that it’s charities, and not government, social enterprise or private sector, that are tasked with doing all the work.

"Uncharitable" (2023). Image: Abramorama

What Uncharitable gets wrong

1) Charities are machines where you input X to get output Y

If you’re looking for a nuanced view of charities, this isn’t the film for you.

Uncharitable assumes that charities are inherently good, and worthy of more resources. Its view of charities is highly archaic.

Uncharitable portrays charities as machines where you feed inputs and it generates outputs.

This traditional model is most people are familiar with - “give $100 and feed a family for a year”. But this model is both dated and limited. It’s the classic “give a person a fish”, as opposed to “teach a person to fish” model.

Of course, this view of charities suits the entire film’s argument. The simpler the filmmakers can portray charities, the easier it is to justify charities just getting more resources. The onus is on the public to address charity ineffectiveness, not on the charities themselves.

2) Charities are not treated the same as for-profit entities, and that’s unfair

One of the central justifications of the film is that charities are treated differently than for-profit entities. We are wary of charity CEOs who earn large salaries, but not of the CEO of Coca Cola, for example. We are okay with corporations spending large amounts of money on marketing, but we abhor charities who spend on fundraising. We don’t mind a bit of wastage in Amazon, but we won’t tolerate wastage in World Vision.

It doesn’t take much reflection to realise how problematic this logic is. Of course non-profit entities are treated differently to for-profit entities – they are two completely different types of structures, with completely different objectives. Corporations aim to maximise profit, charities aim to maximise impact. For-profit companies have shareholder interest at heart, non-profit organisations have community at heart. For-profit companies distribute profit to shareholders, non-profits…don’t distribute profit.

I think this is one of those arguments that - like a lot of things in the charity world, such as TOMS shoes or Playpump - sounds good initially, but the more you think about it, makes little sense.

3) For charities, growth is inherently good

In the film, there’s an underlying assumption that charities do good. Therefore to make charities do more good, we simply need to give them more resources to grow. It’s a simple argument: “Look at all the amazing things this charity has done on a $20m budget, imagine if they had $200m to work with!”

This argument stems directly from the first misconception above - that charities are simply machines to input X and get output Y. The argument then is, in order to get more output Y, we simply need to add more X.

But as I’ve written about in Redundant Charities, what about if a successful charity is one that aims to shrink, not grow? If it shrinks, then it has actually fixed the underlying problem, rather than addressing the symptom.

The Redundant Charity model goes beyond self-interest. Unsurprisingly, the growth-is-good argument, found in this film and Dan’s TED Talk has captivated the interest of many in the charity sector.

But would there be the same passion to promote it if it didn’t advocate for more money (and higher salaries) to flow towards charities?

Dan Palotta in "Uncharitable" (2023). Image: Abramorama

The comparison of for-profit and nonprofit is a little misguided.

More reflection is needed

When I watched Dan Palotta’s TED talk in 2013, I thought he successfully dispelled a number of common charity misconceptions, such as focussing on overheads. Ten years down the track, and with a feature length film, I found myself wanting more.

While the documentary adeptly challenges misconceptions surrounding charities, its simplified arguments and one-sided perspective lacked the deeper introspection needed in the sector to drive meaningful change.

It seems that in the argument to give more money to the charities, to help them to grow, some simple questions were missed.

“What is the point of charity?” 

“What indicates success?”

“What are charities capable of doing, and more importantly, what are the limitations of the charity model?”

In the final few minutes of Uncharitable, there was a moment of introspection. They highlighted the role of NASA, which was not an implementing organisation, but actually a coordination agency. 

“NASA is basically all overhead”, Palotta stated. 

NASA did not actually do the work. It was not that traditional model of charity - a machine where an input of X would get an output of Y.

Here was just a glimmer of hope that a charity could be much more than this simplistic model. That perhaps there was a role for charities to play that wasn’t just addressing symptoms. Unfortunately, a few minutes after this moment, the documentary ended, leaving me wanting more.

More progressive thinking, more reflection, but ultimately, more introspection.

That’s a film that I would love to see.

For the first time, you can now get an eBook copy of Redundant Charities directly from me through Gumroad. Even better, for the month of December you can pay only what you want, and gift it to someone else.

Read the book? Don't forget to leave your review on Goodreads.