High net worth individuals and philanthropists are often “badly handled” by fundraisers, who lack the requisite knowledge and skills to increase major donor giving, according to New Philanthropy Capital.
Speaking about the findings of NPC's latest report on philanthropy, entitled Giving more and giving better, Angela Kail, head of the funder team at the think tank (pictured), told Civil Society News that many major donors feel “badly handled” by fundraisers.
Kail put this down to a number of reasons that she came across while speaking to philanthropists. She said that many reported to NPC that fundraisers often don’t contact them after they’ve made a gift and even offer “glib answers” to questions about where their money is going and how it will be used.
“One of the points we kept coming back to in the research is that major donors are often quite badly handled by fundraisers,” she said.
“This is due to a lot of different things. Sometimes once the cheque is written, the donor is never contacted again, or aren’t made to feel appreciated. Some reported being given quite glib answers to social problems, or that some fundraisers don’t have the awareness to really drill down to the root of the problems”.
Kail said that this could have something to do with a general lack of skills and knowledge in the fundraising sector when it comes to building relationships with major donors; as well as a general culture of short-termist thinking in the sector.
“Fundraisers are quite often given very short term targets and targets that are only about increasing income in the short term for their own charity,” said Kail.
“There’s also this feeling that there’s a limited pie in terms of philanthropy; that if one charity gets something than another doesn’t. If this mind-set was changed, the sector as a whole could actually encourage high net worth individuals to give more overall”.
While NPC’s report found that fundraisers are to blame for the relatively small level of philanthropic giving in the UK, Kail also said that high net worth individuals are also at fault.
“One thing we did in the report was actually look at how much is given by high net worth individuals. We found that it’s not actually that high, considering how much they’re worth. If you’ve got a couple of million pounds in the bank and you only give £1000 to charity, you shouldn’t really be celebrated or praised for that”.
She also said that the documented loss of public trust and confidence in the sector hasn’t had a profoundly damaging effect on philanthropists.
Instead, Kail believes that the result of the EU referendum, and the subsequent instability of the financial markets, may have a bigger effect on major donor gifts.
“A bigger problem will be Brexit, actually. Philanthropy went down in 2008, after the global financial crisis. Particularly as the City is likely to be quite badly hit by Brexit, it makes it all the more important that fundraisers rise to the challenge.”
NPC’s report was published on Tuesday. Drawing from research conducted by wealth management team Scorpio Management and written in tandem with the Hazlehurst Trust; the paper found that a new approach to philanthropy could increase donations from the super-rich more than five-fold from its current level of around £1.3bn a year, to more than £5bn.
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