Child Protection Organizations
How will the child protection branches benefit?
It is difficult to provide services to the children without sufficient funding. The Homecare team’s first meetings were with Bettie Nieuwoudt (Director of Child Welfare Stellenbosch). She explained that she can only afford to pay her social workers at entry level 40% less than what social workers employed by the Government is earning. The income gap expands even more on earnings at higher levels and with years’ experience.
Non-Governmental organizations often loose well qualified personnel due to insufficient funds. The management teams are then pressured to constantly employ and train new people and this makes it difficult to focus on their core tasks.
Most companies cannot afford donations in the current recession. The financial slump put enormous pressure on all the different NPO’s. There is almost too many NPO’s in our country. All of these organizations want to make positive contributions. It is however impossible to support everybody.
The Homecare team had a chance to visit a number of Child Welfare branches and gained critical information out of these visits.
Fundraising has definitely become more challenging to accomplish. In most cases, board members of the NPO’s manage fundraising activities themselves. Often these board members support the child protection branches part-time without financial rewards. NGO's that employs full-time fundraisers are often more successful in their attempts to raise funds.
We also had a chance to meet with different management teams (White black and coloured). There are concerns raised by the coloured management teams about how white business owners are not willing to support brown management teams when it comes to donations. We later explain how the Homecare team will work, and how any challenges faced in the past, can be overcome.
This is a project about protecting children. There is no distinction between white, black or coloured children. There is also no distinction between supporting white, black or coloured management teams. Our task is to help save lives of children.
We publish results of two of the stronger Child Welfare Organizations on this website for discussion purposes. We do not think Bettie Nieuwoudt (Child Welfare Stellenbosch) or Linda Nel (Child Welfare Tshwane) will mind. Financial results of the previous years are the best tools to use when designing new business plans aimed to address problems. We will only address Fundraising and Donations
The results revealed that both organizations had a drop in Fundraising successes. Both management teams agreed that normal strategies such as golf days, social evenings etc. has become less successful.
It was only Linda’s team that was able to increase the “donation income” during the 2016 to 2017 period. In Stellenbosch, which is considered to be a wealthy community, Bettie’s team had a decline in “donation income”. We predict that this will be the norm within most of the NGO’s nationally.
Note that although Stellenbosch dropped donation income, the amount received from donations still exceed Tshwane’s. The Tshwane team is also much larger than the Stellenbosch team. There are most likely 5 times more residents in Centurion and Pretoria compared to Stellenbosch. We analyzed all the information before we started with our software development planning for child protection branches.
We want to compliment Linda Nel and Hanlie Delport from Child Welfare Tshwane on donation drives. Their direct approach to companies and individuals were more successful. We noticed that when companies spend large amounts on marketing material, that they are more successful. Hanlie handed our board members a 2016/2017 Annual report document that was printed on expensive gloss paper in colour. This one document alone is estimated to cost at least R40. (Child Welfare branches who spend larger amounts on marketing material also tends to be more successful in their attempts.)
Linda made a comment which is true. She said that when Hanlie approach companies for donations, that the people do not want to know about their problems… You cannot approach business owners and ask to be rescued. People will rather pay money into Organizations they believe are providing the necessary support to people in need.
Most of the management and marketing teams target the same people to ask for financial support. There is only a small (also declining) number of wealthy people who has the financial means to help. The financial requests are for larger amounts than what NPO’s used to ask for. These potential donators are also starting to close their diaries for appointments.
There are challenges ahead for people tasked to manage the fundraising processes. The more successful NGO branches are relying on people who has been involved over a long period.
According to Mr. Jaco Odendaal (Treasurer of Child Welfare Stellenbosch), most of their fundraising drives were managed by Mr. Wilhelm Landman who was a marketing director of well-established companies (Distell and later Richmond) in Stellenbosch. Mr. Landman knows all the well-connected people in Stellenbosch.
Jaco told us that Mr. Landman also raised his concerns about fundraising/donation negotiation activities. Mr. Landman said that his connections now also find it difficult to support all the NPO’s knocking on their doors.
The biggest concern is; What will happen if Mr. Landman has to resign from the Child Welfare Board? In most cases it will be difficult to find a person amongst the younger generations who are also well-connected. It takes years for fundraisers to build up relationships with wealthy people.
We publish a graphic to explain how people in general are categorized based on LSM Income. (Leisure spending money = funds available after living expenses has been paid). The reality is that the number of LSM people above 8 is only a small percentage of the population in a geographical area. Some areas might have a larger number above 8, but the bulk of the community members are higher in numbers within the lower LSM income category.
It is fair to say that our country is facing huge challenges due to our current economic climate. Businesses are making smaller profits or they close down. Our unemployment figures are rising and our living costs is also increasing. This has a direct impact on how people behave. Most business owners are concerned about the future and they will do their best to keep their own funds to protect their businesses.
There are also other factors we need to take into consideration when we plan and develop software to support child protection branches.
We live in a world where people have different personality types. You will find “caring” people and others that are not caring at all. (We are all actually born with a “caring” personality, but as we grow older, we develop personalities that is unique to us, and that influence our behaviour)
We divided the graphic into two colours.
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Red = People not willing at all to help others
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Green = People with a soft heart and who will do their best to help.
There are numerous people without the financial means who has the personality to help others. We develop software so that we can target these people to secure funding required to support child protection branches. Our economy and the financial pressure people experience has a direct impact on how people behave. We need to keep this in mind as we need to develop software that can address the problem where more people will rather walk away than to help child protection branches.
The only way to safeguard the staff at child protection branches, is to create the ability to raise funds from a larger number of people, which needs to include as low as LSM 2 salary/wage earners.
The NPO with the ability to receive R4 per month out of a low-income person, without the person paying the R4 as a donation him/herself, will win the fundraising war! It is a task not possible when you rely on traditional fund-raising strategies. You need advanced phone app technology to succeed!
To close this introduction page, child welfare branches in partnership will in future be able to secure better support from a large number of South Africans, and from tourists visiting our country.