Research shows that the British public overwhelmingly support the proposed Fundraising Preference Service. But Hugh Radojev says nobody knows what an FPS will look like, or how it will work.
At a breakfast event in London yesterday morning, YouGov dropped something of a research bombshell on the charitable sector. Qualitative research that, in essence, proved a number of things that the sector had suspected, not to mention feared, but which hadn’t yet been quantified. Just how badly did the death of Olive Cooke and the subsequent events of last summer really damage the public’s trust in charities?
Very badly, in short.
The top line figures from YouGov’s Charity Reputation Research make for chastening reading for the sector as a whole. Of the 2,000 odd people surveyed earlier in February 2016, over 60 per cent say that the actions of large charities have “damaged the reputation of the sector as a whole”.
YouGov’s research also shows that the public seem to be overwhelmingly on the side of the mainstream media when it comes to charity attack articles. As if to make matters worse, respondents also felt that charities haven’t taken those articles seriously enough.
Amongst all the concerning data though, one figure seems to stick out: a whopping 72 per cent of respondents say that the Fundraising Preference Service will “restore trust in the charity sector”. While the number is certainly an arresting one, what does it actually mean?
The wording of the question that YouGov put to its respondents was: “some people say their trust in the charitable sector has fallen in recent times. To what extent, if any, do you think each of the following measures would help increase trust in the charitable sector?”
While the other measures put to respondents are all somewhat self-explanatory; ‘greater transparency’, ‘compulsory opt in/out boxes’, ‘creation of the Fundraising Regulator’ – what the FPS will look like and how it will work remain as big a mystery now as when it was first recommended in September 2015.
How can anyone make an informed decision about the effect an FPS will have on public trust, when those tasked with effectively building it still don't know how its going to work in practice? It’s impossible.
The Top 100 Fundraising Charities Spotlight report, released at the beginning of the week, shows that some £9.5bn was raised by charities in the UK in 2015 – a record high. While the data is taken from before the travails of the summer, it still shows the important place that the charity sector holds in the hearts and minds of the British public. ‘The generous British public’ may be an oft-repeated phrase in the sector, but it isn’t any less true for that.
With that in mind, might it not be worth waiting until the FPS has actually taken shape before we start asking the British public what they think of it? If, as some of the doomsday predictors in the sector fear, the FPS really is a ‘nuclear option,’ might the millions of Britons who support charities every year be just as concerned by that as the charities themselves are? And if, as both Messer’s Dunmore and Kidd suggest, the FPS proves to be full of nuance and offers a real ‘granularity of choice’ to donors, might they not also be interested to know?
Indeed, once George Kidd's working group has devised its FPS, would it not then be a good time to put it to the public? Explain in full how it works; both for the charities and suppliers but also, most importantly, for the donors themselves.
Surely then, and only then, can we truly gauge what the public thinks of the Fundraising Preference Service.
As the YouGov research shows, the damage has already been done. However, that doesn’t have to mean it’s too late to repair it. The public might feel hurt, even abused by the sector, but that doesn't mean that they've fallen out of love with the idea of charity.
