Survey responses (5)

Over the Easter period we’ve post five short summaries of the responses – just for interest really.

This is the fifth instalment.

We asked you:

Our newsletter subscribers are a very active group – and that doesn’t surprise us at all, and explains why you respond so quickly to requests for help. Thank you.

In the free text ‘answers’, some of you asked some questions. Here are some examples with answers:

• Q1: why aren’t you a charity? A: We might be in time, but we’re still thinking about it. The advantages are all financial – Gift Aid, no Corporation Tax anda few other things. The disadvantages are all to do with how it would eat up our time, create more work every year and possibly restrict how outspoken we could be about ‘political’ issues. At the moment we’d rather spend our time, energy and money campaigning and taking legal cases. But we have this nagging feeling it would be the right thing to do eventually.
• Q2: why don’t you sell merchandise to make more money? A: We have discussed this a few times and we can’t agree! Would the revenue repay the time? Do we want to be selling more ‘stuff’ in a world full of ‘stuff’. This issue is parked for a while because we are too busy with other things.
• Q3: will you help me….? A: We read every email that comes to us and we have given small amounts of help in the form of advice, information and introductions to worthy causes, but we can’t tackle anything other than a small number of issues at once – we’re a small organisation with no permanent staff. Our experience is that when we get into an issue we stick with it for a long time eg general licences. It’s important that we don’t start more projects or campaigns than we can finish.
• Q4: why can’t I make regular monthly donations to Wild Justice? A: you can, and quite a lot of people do – thank you! But you have to set these up with your bank, we don’t do Direct Debits (they are too complicated for us to deal with at the moment).
• Q5: why don’t you have a membership fee like most other conservation organisations? A: we aren’t like most other conservation organisations! Our newsletter is free – anyone can subscribe. If you like what we do then we think you’ll support us financially and we’d rather leave the amount entirely up to you. If you think we’re doing good work then please support us, but if you don’t, keep an eye on us and we might well amaze you in the future and then you can give us money if you feel that way. We could wind up Wild Justice very quickly if the money stopped coming in for our work, and if you don’t like what we do then that’s what we would have to do. We don’t have land, offices, permanent staff, salaries, pensions, stock or any of those things that we need to fund. We pay our bills on time – usually on the day they are rpesented to us and we don’t have any debts. At the moment, thousands and thousands of people like what we are doing and want to support us – we’ll trust that as our financial model for at least a while.