Wilful Neglect

Recently Childline have started running an advert which presents some facts that I believe they should have raised internally before coming running to the public agressively and needlessly begging.

The advert explains how it takes an enormous amount of courage for a child to call Childline, but at the moment, they are only able to answer around half of those calls. It shows a little girl sitting there on the phone just waiting for her call to be answered. Apparently the only way to correct this is for them to get more money from the public.

I disagree.

Before that advert came out, they should have fired whoever runs their call centre, and employed someone with a basic grasp of numbers who could easily and immediately correct that abysmal performance statistic. In what other industry would a company try to get you to invest in it by running an advert explaining what a shit job they were doing?

Answering less than half their calls is pathetic, there is no getting around that, and when you look at their financial data, it raises some questions. I include the graphic below, but if I were you I’d go to their website to look myself.

OK, here’s my problem. How can they say that the problem could be solved with more money, when they have made £800,000 more than they have spent? If the problem is a shortage of money, why do they still have loads left? The service they provide is called “Childline” and their main function is to provide a telephone service that young people can turn to whenever they need help. How can they justify saying that they answer less then half their calls, when they haven’t spent all the money available to them. They are a fucking helpline, and before they do anything else, they need to make sure they can answer the phone all the time. Everything else they do is superfluous, so they should spend whatever money they have on sorting that out, and worry about the rest later.

So, using the information they have made available to me, I’m going to fix their woefully organised shit fest company. Allow me to educate.

According to the website, 2000 phone calls don’t get through every day, which is apparently 730000 ‘children’ they don’t speak to each year.

This is a very clever manipulation of a statistic, but nobody ever notices it. 2000 ‘phone calls’ a day becomes 2000 ‘Children’. People assume that each phone call is some poor little bastard kid who’s getting beaten like a ginger stepchild desperate to get some help, but if you give it some thought, you’ll realise it’s nowhere near that many. Imagine you were phoning for support for say your iPod, which is of course broken. Imagine you phoned them, and either nobody answered, or you got a busy tone. What would you do?

Would I be right in saying you’d call the bastards straight back? Now imagine the same thing happened again. You’d call them back again. Then imagine that this time you got through. Now answer me these questions:

How many phone calls did you make?

How many people are you?

It’s ridiculous to think that most of the children that don’t get through don’t just try again until they do. The likelihood is that most of the kids that do get through have had to call a few times to do so, so 2000 phone calls is probably more like 500 children, 1000 at the most. The fact they are so hopeless actually means that they take more phone calls than they would if they answered every call, because then people would only have to phone once.

But if the call stats were lower, then they couldn’t justify asking for more money could they?

What I just outlined is undeniably true, if anyone wants to seriously suggest that most of the people who do not manage to get through to Childline when they call the first time do not just immediately call back then they’re welcome to, but it will just highlight what a witless dick they are. For the sake of argument though, I’m going to pretend that there genuinely are 730,000 ‘children’ trying to get through, and that that figure isn’t utterly ridiculous. And I’m still going to prove that they could answer every one of those calls.

According to their website, it costs £3 to answer one phone call (Incidentally I believe this is another failure, I could get that down to £1 I reckon, but I don’t have the data, so we’ll let it go). They had £800,000 remaining at the end of the financial year. If they simply spend that on their helpline, and it costs £3 to answer each call, £800,000 equates to 266,666 phone calls. So just using the money they already have, they can reduce the number of calls they are missing each year to 463,334.

I haven’t even done anything yet, not a thing, I just spent the money that’s there already. It’s free you know, I’m not charging for this!

Now my next point. They spend £5.4m on ‘Public Education and Fundraising’. Notice how these two things get grouped into one, and then please tell me why the fuck they’ve done that. The point of these graphs was to show where their money goes, so presumably it’s not OK to just group things together, because that clouds where the money is going. For me, the only reason they’ve been shown like this is to cover up the fact that they spend a fortune on fundraising events which as the graph clearly shows, only generate a fraction of what they spent on running them in the first place. It would be cynical of me to suggest that they just like going to expensive hotels for fundraising dinners, and I feel completely comfortable with that.

The ‘where our money comes from’ section clearly shows they only make £1.3m from fundraising events, so basically what they are saying is that they spend a shit load of money running events which generate considerably less in return. They then write this off and say although they lose money, the events provide ‘public education’. Very clever, but ultimately it’s a big pile of stinking cocks. Anyone who goes to these events already cares, they don’t need educating. Nobody who doesn’t already appreciate the need for a certain charity attends these events. Nobody from the public goes to a charitable event that they have no prior interest in, so calling it education is rubbish.

So considering they are a waste of time, would it not be a good idea to just stop running them completely? Income would go down to £13.3m, but expenses would also go down to £8.4 million. In other words, just doing that makes another £4.1m available to Childline. It costs £3 to answer a call, and thanks to me there are currently only 463,334 calls going unanswered each year. At £3 a call, 463,334 calls costs £1.4m to answer. Take that out of the £4.1m, and there is still £2.7m left.

So, without any additional money coming in, I’ve organised it so they can answer every single call that comes into them, and I’ve saved them £2.7m. And again, realistically they would not be taking the same number of phone calls if they answered them all, because nobody would have to be calling them twice anymore. Realistically, I’ve just fixed Childline for the next 5 years at least.

I’m not even asking them to thank me, I’m handing this shit out for free!

They should also get a decent call management system, I don’t know what happens at the moment when you call them, but if they’re dropping half of their calls, I’m guessing it isn’t a call queue, and it fucking well should be.

“Thank you for calling Childline. All our counsellors are currently busy, but your abuse is important to us, and we will answer your call shortly. Please do not kill yourself”.

Going on from that, they should have an automated service so they can effectively route their calls. For example…

If you are being touched by your step dad, press 1
If you have a question about sex, press 2
If you are being beaten with sticks, press 3
If you are upset about the end of Harry Potter, press 4
If you are pregnant and shouldn’t be, press 5
If you are considering running away, press 6
If you are considering suicide, press 7
If you are just calling as a joke, press 8
If you think you might be gay, press 9

You can then take the right action based on the options. If they are upset about the end of Harry Potter for example, a large man can be sent to their house to beat them with a rock.

I know some people will bitch and say I’m having a go at a charity, but in fact the reason I’m having a go at them is that they are failing horribly and they clearly shouldn’t be. Anyone with the slightest mental ability could fix their problems, and they should do that before they come asking for more money. Giving a desperate child a lifeline and then making the poor bastard wait on the end of the phone is just furthering his neglect. They might as well just go to a local school and slap a random toddler for all the good they’re doing.

It strikes me that the reason they don’t answer all their calls is so they can run these adverts and make people feel guilty in order to get more money. They could easily answer every call, but if they did they couldn’t play the guilt card to make people give them more, so they don’t do it. They fail completely, then act like they should be given more money.

The stupid thing is, if they got their call stats up to 100% of calls answered, and they ran an advert telling me they were providing an excellent service and they needed to keep funds up in order to for this performance to remain the same, then I’d happily donate my money. But if they tell me that they run a biblically shit helpline despite having nearly £1m spare at the end of the year, then you’ll forgive me for thinking they should go fuck themselves.

I have nothing but respect for the people that actually do charitable work for genuine reasons, but organised charity is generally just a corrupt enterprise designed to extort money from decent people by falsely eliciting feelings of guilt. Either that or they’re disastrously incompetent. I’m not sure which is worse.

Just so it’s clear, I don’t expect Childline to pay me anything for any of the above advice. Now that’s Charity.