WENDY KNOWLER | Gift of the Givers sets standard for relief organisations

In a country so lamentably lacking in service delivery, how can we not love how Gift of the Givers swoops in and saves the day when disaster strikes?

From drilling boreholes as an emergency response to months of inconsistent water supply at Joburg’s Helen Joseph Hospital to getting food and medication to desperate people when supplies to Gauteng and KZN were sabotaged in July’s week of mayhem, its teams showed up in distinctive Springbok green uniforms and did what needed to be done.

The Pietermaritzburg-based organisation has provided R3.5m in aid in 44 countries in the past 28 years, making it Africa’s largest non-governmental disaster response organisation.

I was part of small media contingents tagging along on two of the organisation’s missions in the mid-2000s — to Somalia shortly after a tsunami destroyed a village and to Niger, to take food and medicine to people literally starving to death after a devastating crop failure.

Can’t we just pay our taxes to Gift of the Givers? At least we know they’ll spend it wisely.

—  Social media post

Witnessing GOTG founder Dr Imtiaz Sooliman in action is an extraordinary experience. He’s utterly unflappable in the face of logistical and political curve balls — such as our unscheduled touchdown in Uganda en route to Somalia - and a supreme negotiator.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, prevents him from succeeding in his mission: he’s a man with a plan, second to none.

But it’s his organisation’s work at home which has mostly endeared him to South Africans, of course — we know that when things go truly, horribly wrong, we can count on it to help.

This while doing a huge amount of good — largely under the radar — with many projects in hunger alleviation, water provision, health and education, year round.

So it was no surprise to me when people started taking to social media to post things along the lines of: “Can’t we just pay our taxes to Gift of the Givers? At least we know they’ll spend it wisely” and “Let GOTG run the country already!”

Those comments spiked at the time of the devastating Cape Town fire in April, and with them came many tweets and WhatsApps suggesting people switch their MySchool/MyVillage beneficiary to Gift of the Givers.

With about 4,000 University of Cape Town (UCT) students having been evacuated from residences near its main campus, Gift of the Givers was asked to feed them, wherever they were. Typically, the organisation swung into action immediately and fed those students three meals daily for the next week.

So why am I mentioning all this in a consumer column?

Because I recently discovered that consumers who have MySchool/MyVillage/MyPlanet cards have been adding GOTG as their beneficiary or switching to them in record numbers this year.

MySchool GM Peter Twine confirmed that there’s been a 400% year-on-year increase in funds raised for the organisation, mostly thanks to Woolworths customers’ card swipes.

To put that into perspective, the next closest MySchool/MyVillage/MyPlanet beneficiary — Twine declined to name them — saw an 87% increase in funds in the same period.

And get this, from being ranked 104 on MySchool’s beneficiaries’ list a year ago, Gift of the Givers is now sitting in 15th place.

“We’ve also been encouraging our members to add GOTG as a beneficiary,” Twine told me.

Between January and June this year, 1,703 MySchool cardholders switched beneficiaries to GOTG and 1,253 signed up to the programme with GOTG as a beneficiary. Appreciation for the organisation among MySchool members reached an all-time high in April, the month of the big fire — 934 people switched and 385 signed up as new members with GOTG as a beneficiary.

That means since the beginning of 2021 the income GOTG has received from MySchool has more than trebled — from just under R15,000 in January to almost R48,000 in June. Twine didn’t have the July figures to share with me, but I’m pretty sure the organisation had another spike in MySchool/MyVillage beneficiary nominations for GOTG, thanks to the organisation putting its entire machinery into action in the wake of the looting and destruction in Gauteng and, particularly, KZN.

Most loyalty rewards programmes give money and nice-to-haves to members in return for their spend, but in this case their reward is the feel-goods they get from knowing their spend is benefiting an organisation they admire and trust.

MySchool has been operating for more than 20 years, its name expanding to include Village and Planet as community and environmental organisations came on board.

Between them, they’ve received R816m from MySchool over the years. Woolworths was the programme’s main partner from the start and now owns the entire business, with non-competing, “complimentary” partners coming on board later. So you can now also swipe for the charities of your choice — you can nominate up to three of them - at the likes of Builders, Engen and Netstar.

But it’s the Woolies’ cardholders who are “gifting” most of the money, by far. And in so doing, they’re revealing their heroes.