Charity can be a controversial topic. A series of scandals over the last year have demonstrated that the public are particularly sensitive when it comes to the use of charity funds, so when it was revealed that a group of fundraising volunteers for a charity based in Jinhua, East China's Zhejiang Province, were receiving a cut of the donations, angry voices were quick to lash out online.

Founded in 2007, Shilehui, an organization affiliated with the Jinhua Charity Federation, has started to provide its fundraising volunteers with a cut of up to 15 percent of the money donated, Fang Lu, the chairman of the organization, told the Global Times.

After the volunteers visit people in need of help - such as sick, childless elderly people in rural areas, or handicapped children - and verify their identities, they donate some of their own money to these people. They then use a website to publish the photos of the people in need as well as the receipt of the donation and related documentation, then collect donations from the public, according to Fang.

These donations go to the volunteers who provided the donation, in order to cover their costs, and they earn a little bit extra.

Fang said that if the volunteers donated 1,000 yuan ($157) to the needy people and spent 25 yuan on travel costs, they could ask the public to donate at most 1,175 yuan, and the volunteers could earn at most 150 yuan after their costs were covered.

"We are the first charity organization in China to introduce the donating-before-fundraising model," Fang said, "and we will stick to the model in the future."

Most of the volunteers are self-employed entrepreneurs, and some are students, and none are employees of Shilehui, according to Fang.

Most of the salaries of Shilehui employees are sponsored by a local enterprise in Jinhua, which donates about 600,000 yuan to the organization each year, but Fang refused to reveal the name of the enterprise. The public can also donate money to the employees, he said.

Employee salaries and administrative expenditures of most Chinese charity organizations are usually no more than 10 percent of their annual income, which is composed of the donations, returns from investment and other earnings, said Peng Jianmei, a director with the China Charity & Donation Information Center at the Ministry of Civil Affairs.

Outburst of queries

Pu Baoyi, a veteran journalist and commentator with more than 53,000 followers on his Sina Weibo account, questioned the identity and fundraising methods of Shilehui in posts published from July 5 to 8.

The paid volunteers "crazily" publish comments on microblogs asking for donations, which annoys Web users, Pu wrote. He also raised questions about the 2011 audit report of the organization.

Paying 15 percent of the donations to volunteers is against national regulations, which stipulate that the salary of charity workers and administrative expenses should not exceed 10 percent of the total expenditure of the organization, he added.

He Chao, communications manager of the China branch of the Toronto-based humanitarian organization Right to Play, told the Global Times that it was inappropriate for the organization to emblazon their website with a promise that "100 percent" of the money donated would go to needy people, since 15 percent may go to the volunteers.

Ruan Yang, a 30-year-old self-employed entrepreneur from Jinhua who has donated 20 yuan to Shilehui every day since April, told the Global Times she felt cheated when she learned about the 15 percent reward for volunteers.

"If they told me beforehand, I would have been glad to donate, but now I feel cheated," she said.

Shilehui responds

Fang said that the "crazy" posts cited by Pu were not published by the employees or volunteers of Shilehui, but by people in need of donations.

He added that the money paid to the volunteers was less than 5 percent of their total expenditure.

"We have collected about 7.3 million yuan in donations since April, only 200,000 yuan of this was paid to our volunteers," he said.

Hua Wengui, general secretary of the Jinhua Charity Federation, said the federation had not found any problems with the finances of Shilehui from the audit reports, the Hangzhou-based newspaper, the Metropolis Express, reported.

A volunteer speaks

He Jiquan, a senior student from the Henan-based Anyang Institute of Technology who started working as a fundraising volunteer at Shilehui from early July, told the Global Times he was saddened by the online onslaught.

"We are helping others simply out of the goodness of our hearts, but some of these queries really hurt me."

His team has helped 75 students and elderly people from poverty-stricken areas, some of which can only be reached after walking on mountain roads for hours, he said.

He has worked for over 40 days at Shilehui, but only received about 1,900 yuan as a reward. So far, the fundraising efforts for 17 of the 75 people his team helped have not been completed, which means the money his team donated to these people has yet to be paid back.

From March 2011 to this April, all the fundraising volunteers of Shilehui were not paid at all, but Fang discovered that more than half of them then left the organization because they had to pay travel costs and other expenditures themselves.

In order to encourage the volunteers, Fang decided to adopt the "paid volunteers" model in April, and it has worked since then, he said.

According to him, the organization helped 2,428 families in 2011, and the number is expected to top 5,000 this year.

Involving more people

As a new fundraising model in China, the "paid volunteers" model has the potential to get more people involved in public charity, Zang Yingnian, a former consultant for the China branch of UNICEF and the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, who is now the current leader of a project for the Wu Jieping Medical Foundation, told the Global Times.

He added that strict inspections should be enforced regarding charity organizations.

"Paid fundraising is a common practice in Western countries, and Indiana University even has fundraising classes. It will inevitably become the fundraising pattern in China in the future," said Wang Zhenyao, the former head of the Department of Social Welfare and Charity Promotion under the Ministry of Civil Affairs.

With monetary rewards, helping others can become a sustainable activity for more people, including some people with low incomes, Fang said.