What's the story with festive charity products?

So you're feeling flush this Christmas and buying presents for all your friends. But as your wallet gets lighter, your conscience grows heavy and you feel the need to share your good fortune with the less fortunate.

You don't have far to look; Christmas is boom time for the charity business as much as any other. From charity cards to gift vouchers, fun-runs to swims, to simply dropping money in an outstretched hat, there are myriad ways to be altruistic this festive season.

Potentially, though, charity-giving is as fraught as any other kind of commercial transaction. As with buying regular gifts, this is the hardest time of the year to tell a real deal from a right turkey. Purse-strings are loosened and the level of discrimination that might apply at other times of the year is significantly lowered.

The reality is that many charity products benefit the retailer or the manufacturer more than the charity itself. Others fail to tell the consumer how much is going to charity or what the money will be used for. Although new charity legislation is imminent, for the moment there is little regulation and charities can tell the public as little or as much as they want.

Take charity Christmas cards: some charities produce their own cards and sell them in their own shops or online; others sell them through regular retailers; while others do nothing more than license their name - and the goodwill that goes with it - to printers seeking to maximise their sales by selling to altruistic shoppers.

The proportion of revenue that goes to the good cause varies hugely according to the type of card involved. Unicef says 75 per cent of the price of a box of cards in its Dublin shop goes to the parent charity; Oxfam Ireland says all profits from cards sold in Oxfam shops go to the charity but claims it is impossible to say what percentage of the price of the cards this represents.

When a charity-produced card is sold in a mainstream retailer, the shopkeeper usually takes a cut. The Irish Cancer Society (ICS) says 80 per cent of revenue from cards bought in its Dublin shop or on its website goes to fund cancer programmes, but this figure drops to 66 per cent for cards bought in other shops.

Oxfam Ireland says it sells 60 per cent of cards through commercial retailers but, again, it is unable to say what proportion of the proceeds goes to charity, apart from the fact that it is lower than through its own outlets.

"We consciously promote our cards through a range of high-street retailers to maximise availability and provide a greater exposure of the Oxfam Ireland name to the public," explains the charity's media and communications executive, Paul Dunphy. "By having this large commercial distribution we are able to lower our per-card print costs, which enables us to realise a larger profit."

THE THIRD CATEGORYof charity card, involving licensing agreements with commercial printers, entails the lowest contributions to the charity. But just how low? Unlike the UK, there is no requirement on card-sellers to state what proportion of profits is being donated to charity, so none of them bothers.

Insiders talk about contributions of less than 10 per cent, and we do know of figures of 10 per cent because a number of cards produced in the UK, where this information must be displayed, are on sale in Ireland.

Marks & Spencer, for example, gives 10 per cent from the sale of its cards to Focus Ireland. The Irish Cancer Society's arrangement with Boots provides for a 10 per cent cut for the charity, a far cry from the 80 per cent it gets from selling its own cards in-house. Debenhams, meanwhile, gives 20 per cent of the price of its cards to the ISPCC.

But does it really matter how much a charity makes from a box of cards? Oxfam raises €175,000 each Christmas from its card sales, and says the business is an important source of revenue. The Irish Cancer Society can clearly put to good use the €15,000 it gets from the tie-in with Boots.

But what fraction of total revenue from the cards do these figures represent? Irish people will send 110 million Christmas cards this year and if one quarter of these are charity versions costing €1 each, that gives a pot of almost €30 million.

Diverting just 25 per cent of this to charity gives a total contribution of more than €7 million, considerably more than the figures mentioned above.

Of course, since Trócaire invented "global gifts" at Christmas seven years ago, there are far more lucrative ways for charities to encourage people to show their generosity. Most of the large aid agencies now offer gift schemes, allowing donors to "buy" the staples of development work the world over - goats, cooking stoves, seeds, and so on.

In most cases, the agencies are vague about where the money will be spent. Oxfam says the money it raises goes into one of four funds and may be transferred if more gifts are sold than are required in a particular fund. Trócaire says the money it raises goes to "a family or community in the developing world".

But at least in these cases, all your contribution is going to the charity - less the cost of running the promotional scheme, less the administration costs of the development work. Trócaire says it has raised €17 million from global gifts for its projects throughout the developing world.

FINALLY, THERE ISanother option. Christmas always sees a rise in begging, whether for reasons of hardship or opportunism. Dropping a note in someone's outstretched hand amounts to a direct and total transfer of assets but, as homeless campaigner Fr Peter McVerry says, it doesn't guarantee that your money will be used for the purpose for which it was given.

"Some of those who are begging are not actually homeless, so my preference would be for people to donate to a charity," he says.

However, if people want to give money to people on the street, he has some advice: "Give money at the start of the week, not the end. On Thursday and Friday, people are paid and town is packed. If you see someone begging on a wintery Monday or Tuesday evening, you know they really need it."