In my line of business (web hosting) many companies have encouraged customers to believe that setting up and running a web site is easy. People have been encouraged to start web sites when they do not have the technical knowledge to get them working and have been given the impression that they don't need to learn how the web works in order to get results. This leads to disappointment and people deciding that they should not have a web site. The overall effect has been to alienate a large number of possible customers from ever having a web site.
The same is true of charities. I was looking at a leaflet from an organisation called "Defeating Deafness" earlier today. Even the name of the charity raises an expectation that by giving them money deafness can be stopped or healed. Obviously it is more complex than that but given the amount of money thathas been donated to cancer appeals over the years and the general lack of progress towards a cure for cancer its easy to see why people would become dissolusioned. Similarly, People say there is no point in giving money to famine in africa because it just comes back.
Charities are to blame. They have raised the expectation that its possible to defeat world hunger, when maybe we have just have a moral obligation to keep feeding people when these disasters happen.
Who will be the first charity say they can't actually fix anything, just make things better in the mean time?
