Charities losing their share of public attention, says Charity Monitor
Howard Lake | 4 July 2004 | News
An analysis of Charity Monitor survey data over the last few years suggests that charities in general have not been maintaining their share of public attention.
Charity Monitor reports that in the last five years there has been an average drop of 9% in spontaneous awareness of charities. The fall has been most severe among the over 75 year-olds whose spontaneous recall is down on average by 24%. The next biggest fall was among under 35’s (-9.5%) and least affected were the 35-74’s (-7.5%).
The decline in total (prompted) awareness is marked. At the start of the last decade eight charities had total awareness scores of 90% or higher. This had been reduced to only one by 2003, with the majority now scoring below 80%.
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Andrew Papworth of Charity Monitor is convinced that the phenomenon is real but admits that it is hard to be sure what has caused it. “It could be a sign of falling interest in charities or disillusionment with them. It could be a sign of so-called compassion fatigue,” he said. “Or it could be that there are now so many charities clamouring for our attention these days that the currency of awareness has become devalued. Perhaps there is overkill and people are switching off.”
Another possible explanation that Papworth wonders about is a fundamental change in fundraising methods to what he calls the ‘oozlum-bird strategy’. “In the last few years,” he said, “many charities have switched their attention and resources from a mix of mass marketing and targeted fundraising to micro-marketing alone with RoI as king. Could it be that ever-increasing accuracy of targeting on responders means that the sector is disappearing up its own bottom line and neglecting to make their case to the wider public?”
Whatever the reason, Papworth thinks that falling awareness levels do matter. He argues that it is undeniable that it is very much harder for a charity to get potential supporters to act if they’ve never heard of it and know nothing about it. “Think about somebody drawing up a Will and contemplating a charitable bequest,” he said. “Unless you have managed to lodge your charity in his or her mind over the years and made a case for support, the chances are that the last convincing mailshot to have landed on the doormat will spring to mind and you’ll be cut off without a bean.”
He also wonders whether some major charities have been guilty of feeding off the awareness they created a generation or more ago and have become so fixated by the immediate returns from the current best prospects that they have ignored their seed corn.
Of course, as Papworth acknowledges, the cost of sustained “hearts and minds” advertising in today’s fragmented multi-media world is enormous and the pay-off has to be thought of in terms of years rather than weeks. This makes it a major act of faith for trustees to sanction. But he believes that failure to invest for the future will prove damaging to the sector in the long run. “It mirrors the arguments that go on within FMCG marketing between the proponents of brand-building advertising and sales promotion,” said Papworth. “The fact remains that the brands that have been most successful in the long-term have been those which have maintained a mix with a strong element of brand advertising.”
The Charity Monitor was designed and launched by Andrew Papworth for the RNLI 14 years ago and has been running every four months since then. Its primary purpose was to provide the RNLI with authoritative information on its public awareness and on the public’s likelihood to donate to “the Lifeboats” in the context of what was happening to other charities and wider market factors. Surveys are carried out in April, August and December each year among 1,000 adults representative of the population of Great Britain. Data from the last three surveys are aggregated to give robust sub-samples for demographic and regional analyses. They collect data about Wills and charitable bequests, spontaneous and prompted awareness of about thirty major charities, likelihood to give and perceived effectiveness data for a few selected charities, preferences in methods of helping charities and newspaper readerships.
For some years the RNLI have allowed Andrew Papworth 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. So far, five major charities have subscribed to the data.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.