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Adam Rothwell
- Thursday, May 10, 2007
EIGHTY-THREE PER CENT of charity workers don't think they treat donors as well as they should. And 92 per cent think that the public doesn't understand what charities do - according to a survey out today.The same poll reveals that charities don't understand what the public want. When charity workers are asked to rank the words that best describe their organization, they put 'passionate' and 'caring' at the top of the list. But the public, it seems, doesn't think passion or care are so important - instead, it's much more interested in organizations that are 'trustworthy' and 'honest'.
Charities are out of touch - and that's had a big impact on trust. In 2003, just over 70 per cent of people polled by YouGov said they trusted charity bosses. Only four years later, that figure has plumetted to 60 per cent. Charities have been losing trust quicker than almost any other other type of organization in Britain.
I find all of the above astonishing. Charities have apparently conceded that they work ineffectively and don't know how to communicate with the public. They're hemorrhaging goodwill. Even worse, there's scant evidence that they're doing anything to put the situation right. Reading this damning self-assessment, it's a wonder anyone gives to charity at all.
None of this is to deny that some charities do superlative work. But it does suggest that when it comes to anything beyond their core mission, they fall flat.
Of course it's important for donors that their charities are honest. It goes without saying. But then it goes without saying that charity workers think their organisation is honest, so why would you name it as a word that describes them.
Perhaps an analogy. A friend asks me to describe my ideal partner, and I might have a list including smart, funny, passionate, and so on. I don't put female, because for me that's obvious. But someone else making the list for a third party would probably put female at the top of the list, because the third party newspaper reporter wtriting the article might not know.(Did I slip out of analogy?)
We've had a couple of queries about the first sentence of this blog entry. It's important to emphasize that this does not imply that most charity workers think their organization is dishonest. All it means is that most charity employees would choose other words to describe where they work. It's also important to emphasize, however, that I still find this surprising.
Adam, Intelligent Giving
I wonder a bit whether there's some mis-match between what the charity employees thought they were answering and your comments. The Third Sector article talks about asking the public and the employees to pick adjectives that described "their ideal charity" and my guess is that the public picked the things they actually cared about while the employees picked the "buzz words" that they thought ought to be important. In fact what they selected was really very like the (to me intensely irritating) phrases that sites like Do-It use - what do they mean by passion, independence and innovation. I didn't get the impression from the article that the employees thought they were necessarily supposed to be picking adjectives that described their own charities.
I think that not all of the charities that were alarmed with IG were alarmed because of its aims, but its methods.
How does a charity make you trust it? There's an advert on my local radio station for a certain car dealer which has the line "the dealer you can trust", and I don't know about you, but immediately after hearing that line, I felt they couldn't be trusted.
A charity can produce a fantastic annual report but not actually achieve much, while another can put all of its efforts into doing its work, but then make a crummy report, but how do I (as a donor too) know?
You see I am a fundraiser, but I'm also a donor, and because I'm a fundraiser people ask me "how do I know which charities I can trust to do X?". I'm still not sure, but my own advice is to ask. Ask, ask, ask and then ask some more. If the charity as a whole can't answer your questions, then how much can you trust them?
As a fundraiser, I try to know as much as I can about all of the work that we are doing everywhere. And there's a lot. And I tell people the same, ask me ANYTHING. If you ask something I can't answer, I'll get one of our many experts to tell you (or if they're not available right now, I'll ask them for you, and I'll tell you). That's part of what a fundraiser does.
But what about the people who won't ask? i have a potential donor that I think doesn't trust us. If they won't see for themselves our work, and they won't ask me about it, how can i get them to trust us? And this is someone who's interested.
We need more and more people to help us, to help the charity help the beneficiairies, but if they're not really interested in us, or they don't know what we do, then how do I get THEM to trust us?
How do I make YOU trust a charity you know nothing about, and trust enough to choose to help?
For 30 years, charities have built much of their fundraising off the back of elderly donors; what the Americans call the 'Civics' and British fundraisers sometimes call, 'Dorothy Donor'. What these donors wanted was "care" and maybe a little bit of "passion". But essentially they trusted charities in much the same way that they trusted the police, the government, the press, their GP, etc.
This generation is now passing on and we're moving to the era of the Baby Boomers. Savvy, demanding, questionning... and not assuming for one moment that just because they're a charity they are honest and trustworthy.
That is what your survey is showing. Many fundraisers are stuck in the 'Dorothy Donor' mindset and are still coming to terms with the enormous changes that are taking place in their future supporterbase.
Intelligent Giving is a classic example of this. Set up by Baby Boomers (or post Boomers very much in the same mindset) to empower donors. Blimey. Dorothy Donor didn't need that! She "cared" and she "trusted".
Some charities (indeed the Institute of Fundraising) reacted with alarm when IG first launched. Further evidence, I feel, that fundraisers are yet to grasp the changes taking place.
The existence of IG is, in itself, evidence of the trend being shown in this research!
Charities need to embrace IG – and urgently try to understand the implications of this research. If they don't, they're toast.
Thanks for asking!
Steve
www.whitewater.biz
This blog entry used to start with the sentence, 'Sixty per cent of charity workers would think twice before describing the organization they work for as "honest".' But this morning, we removed that sentence.
We did it not because the statement was untrue, but because it was ambiguous. As is pointed out below, it could be interpreted as meaning that charities are generally dishonest - and we don't think they are.
Mikemuses' point about honesty being a given in many organizations is a good one, and it's been made to us by the author of the research, Joe Saxton ( boss of nfpSynergy). It also sounds convincing, but there's unfortunately no way of knowing whether it's actually true.
Adam, Intelligent Giving