Trust me, I'm a fundraiser
4th Sep 2008
Confidence in the sector is beginning to fall. Donors are more cynical than ever when it comes to trusting charities to spend their cash effectively. Is there anything fundraisers can do about it? Steve Andrews asks the questionI received an interesting email the other day from a Mr Erza King. Turns out he’s the auditor of an African country and he’s found a bank account with millions of dollars in it and I can have some if I send him a fee of $2,000!
Can you believe my luck? I wired the money straight away. I haven’t heard back yet but I’m sure that he’ll be in touch soon. Ha ha. OK, so that’s obviously not true.
I didn’t send any money. I just don’t trust Mr King. And if there’s one thing that sits at the heart of whether I give anybody or any organisation some of my money, it’s whether I trust them.
Trust is such a very very big deal for us fundraisers. When there’s lots of it, our job is a whole lot easier. When it’s eroded just a teeny weeny bit, I suspect that the chances of us getting money start to plummet. No-one wants to be the sucker that gave the hungry homeless guy money only to find out it was spent on drugs. Just the chance that he’ll spend our donation on drugs is enough to stop many of us giving to someone who might genuinely be hungry.
This is supported by recent research undertaken for the Charity Commission by Ipsos MORI, which found that “it’s the belief that charities spend their money wisely and effectively which is the most important aspect driving overall trust and confidence”.
So news that the public’s trust in charities is on the wane should worry us all.
At this point, in the interests of honesty, I need to point out that the Charity Commission research mentioned says that trust in charities is high and increasing. And if that’s true, then that is clearly a good thing. And if you’re prepared to take that on face value, you needn’t read on. But I’m sceptical.
I, an optimist at heart, am more inclined to believe the results of nfpSynergy’s Charity Awareness Monitor, launched earlier this year, which suggested a worrying 17.5 per cent drop in public trust of charities between September 2006 and July 2007. It turns out that only 42 per cent of the British public now trust charities. Admittedly this is more than trust the BBC, the Royal Family, the Church or the banks, but that is surely a small consolation.
I found another piece of nfpSynergy research, published back in March 2006, absolutely hilarious. When they asked charity staff what they thought donors were looking for in the ideal charity, the staff said things like ‘passion’ and ‘effectiveness’. When they asked donors what they were looking for in the ideal charity, donors top two answers, polling 70 per cent and 66 per cent respectively, were ‘trustworthiness’ and ‘honesty’! You wouldn’t choose those qualities unless you were worried that they weren’t there.
In Whitewater’s own research into the baby boomers, a lack of trust came screaming through our focus groups. Donors said:
“I want to see evidence of how the money is going to be used.”
“I’m worried about giving charities my bank account details.”
“The bigger the charity, the more like a business they become.”
This last quote was one of many that suggested that the bigger the charity, the more worried many donors become. And if you want to get a powerful sense of this, take a look at the website of the Kitchen Table Charities Trust where John Humphrys of BBC Radio 4 fame almost spits out his disdain for large charities when he says: “There are a vast number of small charities all over the world who do a wonderful job. You’ve probably never even heard of them. They don’t have swanky offices or air-conditioned Land Rovers or money to spend on expensive advertising… I have either seen them myself or know someone who has and can offer an independent assessment. We are not interested in charity as a big business.”
You got to hand it to the guy. He knows his target audience and he’s not shy about being competitive. And if I was to offer one final piece of evidence which points to this new world where trust cannot be taken for granted, it would be the website Intelligent Giving. Their mission is “to help you give happily and with confidence – and, on the way, we want to improve how charities operate, by making them more transparent and accountable.”
Blimey. Dorothy Donor got by for 50 years without the need for such a service! But we live in a very different world now. Dorothy is passing on and a new generation of marketing-savvy, media-soaked, cynical baby boomers and post-boomers are our core audiences. And for them trust absolutely cannot be assumed.
We could debate for hours what the causes of this decreasing trust might be. Is it something that we’ve done wrong as a sector? Is it all that unwanted direct mail? Or those pesky phone calls when we’re trying to eat our tea? Is it press exposés about chief executive salaries? Or expensive advertising campaigns? Have charities just become too damn professional? ‘Charity as a big business’, as Mr Humphrys put it.
I’m quite sure some of these issues have not helped. But I am even more sure that trust would be waning even if they had never happened because this trend is a demographic one, pure and simple. Trust in all the institutions that make up our society is falling fast. We’re just part of a much bigger trend.
So what can we do about this? If this is down to demographics, is it out of our hands? Is it an unstoppable tide?
Well, I believe the answer little bit of yes and quite a lot of no. Yes because we’re unlikely to ever regain the levels of trust that we might have enjoyed 20 years ago. No because there’s plenty we can do to wise up to our new reality and give donors reasons to trust us.
What follows is a far from exhaustive list of some of the things you could do. They are not issues to be tackled by our professional bodies like the Institute of Fundraising, Impact Coalition and the Fundraising Standards Board. They’re tactics charities can adopt, one by one, to build trust.
1) Transparency. Yawn yawn. We’ve heard this one before a dozen times. But as Richard Marsh, director of the Impact Coalition puts it: “Many charities like the thought of being transparent and accountable but in practice they haven’t done much to make this a reality.”
All the evidence suggests that the public think charities spend much more on management and fundraising than they actually do.
So let’s start shouting about this. Give donors this information at the point of asking for money. It’s all very well sticking it in the annual review but 99 per cent of donors will never get to see that.
2) And explain why you do what you do. The RSPCA have started sticking this statement on the back of their cold mailings (see image above):
“ABOUT THIS MAILING: The RSPCA relies on public donations and we use appeals like this one to inform people about our work and ask for their support. These mailing are designed as economically as possible. Although not everyone who gets one will respond to this appeal, we still find it an extremely cost-effective way of raising badly-needed funds.”
The important point here is that the statement is on the outside of the mailing where everyone can see it; not just those who open it up.
If your fundraising costs are 30 per cent, be proud of that and explain it. What that means is if I give you £1 you can turn it into £3. How brilliant is that? Donors may actually want to help with your fundraising costs!
Tell donors how you’re spending their money. I passionately believe that this is more important than any fancy donor care or CRM programme you can design. Donors are absolutely desperate for feedback on how you’re spending their money. At our focus groups they said:
“If I see the results, I’ll definitely give again.”
“If they want to ask for more, they need to show us what they did with the last donation.”
“I want an invitation to visit. To see where the money has gone.”
And my personal favourite…
“I’m with the Donkey Sanctuary. I’ve been there and I’ve seen it.”
They don’t want your general newsletters which might happen to mention the project to which they gave a few months ago. They want specific feedback, directed to them, on how the projects they’ve supported are going. And if possible, they want to see things first-hand.
3) Stop sending mail to dead people and to people’s old addresses. It’s very, very wrong that our sector wastes money in this way. The public see it and it fuels their distrust. There are plenty of companies who can remove these records for less than it costs to mail them. It’s a complete no-brainer.
4) Develop tangible programmes for people to give to. You don’t become an ActionAid donor. You sponsor-a-child. This is tangible and donors love it. Their worst fear is that their money will get lost in the pot. Give them something tangible (and honest!) and they’ll be much happier to support you.
5) Use third party endorsements from people the public trust. I’ve seen one charity test a pack from such a person against a very similar pack from the chief executive. The chief executive pulled 300 per cent less! Why? Because younger donors don’t trust the chief executive as he would say it is good, wouldn’t he? Or why not select a group of donors to visit some projects on behalf of all donors and then report back. That would be very reassuring.
Trust, they say, is something that has to be earned. For today’s donor, this is totally true. So let’s get out there and start earning it.
Steve Andrews, director of charity marketing, The Direct Marketing Group
September 2008