Recent nfpSynergy research showing a sharp drop in public trust in charities. This week, Charity Commission research shows trust remains high. Joe Saxton of nfpSynergy looks at the lessons from both sets of data.
Our research released this week shows that the percentage of people who trust charities has fallen from 66 per cent to 56 per cent over the last year. We had seen trust rise during the last few years, but this drop takes it back down to the level of 2011.
The Charity Commission has also released research today (yes, trust research is like buses).
Their research shows a broadly similar picture to our research, except for the headline level of trust in charities. Both sets of research highlight how important the role of the Charity Commission is, how important it is for charities to show that donations are well spent and how charities need to show their impact and that they are well managed.
The difference in headline levels of trust can be attributed to a number of factors: different methodology (ours is online, the Commission’s by phone), different scoring systems (our is the percentage that trust charities and theirs is a score out of 10), different timeframes (ours is annual, there is every other year) and different comparators (ours are organisational and theirs a mixture of professions and organisations).
The trends in our research over the last few years have shown that trust in charities is volatile. Charities are not alone in this; banks, the BBC and the Royal Family also have volatile levels of trust. In contrast, the armed forces have consistently high levels of trust. Political parties and government have consistently low levels of trust (remember that the next time politicians tell charities that they have a ‘trust’ issue).
It would be easy to worry that maintaining levels of trust in charities is like watching England play football - the performance is mercurial and success is beyond our control. But it’s not. Charities make a difference to trust levels.
Our research shows that there are a number of ways that charities can improve trust. We asked the public what would reassure them their donation was well spent and the results showed that the Charity Commission has a key role in building public trust. For example, 70 per cent of people said they would be reassured by knowing that ‘every new charity has to be scrutinised by the Charity Commission before it is approved’, while 67 per cent of people would be reassured if ‘every charity’s accounts are on the charity commission’s website’. A further 60 per cent feel reassured if ‘the Charity Commission makes every charity say how many staff are paid £60,000 a year or more’.
If we want to reassure the public, we should bang on about the regulatory role of the Charity Commission.
There are other factors that reassure people. 68 per cent of the public would be reassured if a charity said it worked hard to cut costs every year and 64 per cent would if they knew that charities did research to find out the impact they make.
However, reassurance on CEO salaries is an area where charities will need to work harder or be more creative. Just 19 per cent said they would be reassured by being told that ‘paying a CEO less would make a donation less well spent’. Only 21 per cent would feel the same if they were told that ‘paying a CEO £50,000 a year would mean that a charity wouldn’t get the same quality of leader’.
Our research shows that individual charities can do much to reassure their supporters. The wider issue is that no organisation or individual has taken on the sector-wide role of reassuring the public and changing the way people see charities in order to build trust.
