The Economics of Child Sponsorship

We sponsor a child (Luis) through World Vision. We receive letters from our child as well as information about how the child is doing, what's going on in his community as well as the country, and what other opportunities and challenges there are for our child. We've sponsored a child for several years now as a way to connect with under-resourced from the developing world.

World Vision, Compassion, and other organizations, in fact, market their operations in these terms: for $30 (or comparable amount) per month, you can educate, feed, and minister to a child in XYZ. It's a brilliant and successful model. We- and thousands of others- give each month, and our gift directly helps out Luis.

By now, I realize it porbably doesn't work quite that way. It's not that I think that Luis isn't being helped by my gift, it's that I understand the costs of supporting Luis in Ecuador have to be different than the costs of supporting a child in Ethiopia. Or Romania. Or Vietnam. They have to be different, because so many of those costs- the education, the food, the supplies- are contigent on local conditions. But for World Vision it'd be an administrative nightmare to market child sponsorship in Ecuador at $22.50/month but $31.58 in Vietnam and $16.47 in Romania (those prices are completley made up, by the way!). Somewhere along the way they determined that $30 was the magic figure that people would buy in at. And it's brilliant, really. My gift helps out the world's most under-resourced and World Vision gives me a story of how my giving makes a difference. World Vision also gets to use those monies for developing under-resourced communities- which Luis is certainly apart of- without the trap of having to explain each and every cost of working in each and every community they work in. I mean, if I found out that it only cost $20 a month to sponor Luis, would I consider World Vision to be ripping me off since I pay $30?!? Of course not. I'd trust them to then allocate that extra $10 to another Luis in another community.

You can see other examples in World Vision's Gift Catalog (for instance, 2 chickens might cost $25. A great gift- and one I've done before! But again, how much do the chickens really cost and can we be sure they cost the same throughout the globe?!?). Our local Union Gospel Mission advertises how many Thanksgiving meals a certain amount will buy (without knowing how many will eat that meal, how much the food will cost, etc). Our Food Bank does the same thing.

The point in all this is that these non-profits discovered unique and creative ways to partner with their donors. Their marketing pitches tell a creative heartfelt story and invite people to partner with their good work- which many of us are happy to do.