# Charity Monitor tracks impact of bad publicity on charities

- Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/2004/01/13/charity-monitor-tracks-impact-bad-publicity-charities/
- Published: 2004-01-13T00:00:00+00:00
- Author: Howard Lake

Charity Monitor’s four monthly surveys have helped track how bad publicity has affected
two major charities.
Bad publicity can cause serious damage to charities, particularly
in terms of public income. Other times, however, it can blow away without causing
as much damage was might have been expected.

Charity Monitor has tracked the impact of bad publicity on two different major charities,
both of whom have hardly been out of the news for two or three years due to reports
and accusations of profligacy, mismanagement, industrial action and senior management
rows.

Referring to them as charity A and charity B, Charity Monitor tracked the levels
of the the public’s spontaneous awareness and the likeliness of giving to the charities
if asked during the period August 1998 to August 2003. Marketing and advertising
consultant Andrew Papworth, who set up Charity Monitor 13 years ago, commented that
the figures suggested that “the constant publicity has helped to keep their spontaneous
awareness pretty buoyant but public support – measured by likelihood to donate to
them if asked – has fallen.”

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Papworth explained that the two charities were quite different. Charity B has a 
fundamentally stronger appeal in that more people are inclined to give to it than
are spontaneously aware of it, but the strength of its appeal has been seriously
eroded over the last two or three years. Charity A on the other hand started from
a weaker position but has still lost appeal gradually over four or five years.

However, Papworth concludes that “both charities can take some comfort in the fact
that the most recent surveys for the Charity Monitor suggest that the worst may 
be behind them.”

The Charity Monitor was designed and launched by Andrew Papworth for the RNLI and
has been running every four months throughout the past 13 years. For some years 
the RNLI have allowed Andrew to syndicate the general data from the Charity Monitor
to other charities at about a quarter of the cost of going it alone at full market
rates.

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