I already agreed with the premise before reading the article but I really enjoyed reading that! A lovely, funny, and concise article summarising the strengths and limitations of cash benchmarking.
The post avoids (perhaps deliberately to keep the tone light!) giving a name to one of the reasons why certain people are reticent to give cash to others, which I would describe as a kind of condescending paternalism e.g. ‘I know better than them what’s good for them’.
On a day to day you might encounter this kind of thinking with people who might be ok with giving a homeless person food but not cash, because they’re worried they would just ‘use the cash to do drugs’.
My opinion is that even if you think there’s a plausible case for you knowing better than the target audience what’s good for them (e.g the preventative medicine example you give), you can strongly mitigate the risk of paternalism by entering in a genuine dialogue with the target audience, hearing them out, pushing back when necessary, and updating your opinions and levels of certainty with that information. It might be that you stick with your first guess, or amend it quite significantly after hearing them out.
Of course, in the example I gave above of the interaction with a homeless person, there probably realistically isn’t the time to do this kind of work. But I work in the arts and I see that so many charitable artist programmes set up to supposedly help artists actually never ask the beneficiaries what the best use of the money would be! This is the norm elsewhere as well and the source of an appalling level of waste in my opinion. I’m definitely keen to see more cash benchmarking attempts everywhere.
A last comment: sometimes organisations knowingly avoid asking their target audience what would most benefit them because the aim of the organisation was never to actually help the target audience but was to be self-beneficial to the people running the organisations. Again, I see a lot of that in the arts sector.
I already agreed with the premise before reading the article but I really enjoyed reading that! A lovely, funny, and concise article summarising the strengths and limitations of cash benchmarking.
The post avoids (perhaps deliberately to keep the tone light!) giving a name to one of the reasons why certain people are reticent to give cash to others, which I would describe as a kind of condescending paternalism e.g. ‘I know better than them what’s good for them’.
On a day to day you might encounter this kind of thinking with people who might be ok with giving a homeless person food but not cash, because they’re worried they would just ‘use the cash to do drugs’.
My opinion is that even if you think there’s a plausible case for you knowing better than the target audience what’s good for them (e.g the preventative medicine example you give), you can strongly mitigate the risk of paternalism by entering in a genuine dialogue with the target audience, hearing them out, pushing back when necessary, and updating your opinions and levels of certainty with that information. It might be that you stick with your first guess, or amend it quite significantly after hearing them out.
Of course, in the example I gave above of the interaction with a homeless person, there probably realistically isn’t the time to do this kind of work. But I work in the arts and I see that so many charitable artist programmes set up to supposedly help artists actually never ask the beneficiaries what the best use of the money would be! This is the norm elsewhere as well and the source of an appalling level of waste in my opinion. I’m definitely keen to see more cash benchmarking attempts everywhere.
A last comment: sometimes organisations knowingly avoid asking their target audience what would most benefit them because the aim of the organisation was never to actually help the target audience but was to be self-beneficial to the people running the organisations. Again, I see a lot of that in the arts sector.