CAF launches pilot regional campaign to promote giving
Howard Lake | 31 July 2005 | News
CAF (Charities Aid Foundation) has joined forces with newspaper publishers The Kent Messenger Group to pilot a regional awareness campaign to increase charitable donations.
Leading up to National Giving Week (17 2-23 October 2005), Get Kent Giving has been launched through The Kent Messenger Group’s paid-for titles, website kentonline.co.uk and radio station KM FM. The aim is to motivate people and businesses in the county to make regular, tax-efficient donations to their favourite good causes, and to challenge fundraisers to convert their donors into effective givers.
Ken is the home county of Charities Aid Foundation (CAF), who initiated the first National Giving Week in 2004.
Advertisement
The campaign will run through to the end of October. CAF is offering £50,000 to be shared by some Kent charities based on a public vote. Nominations for the funds are being invited from the newspaper group’s readers. Charities can even enter themselves or encourage their volunteers and supporters to nominate them. Charities must be UK registered.
CAF say that they have focused on Kent because households in the South East lag behind less well off regions of the country when it comes to giving to charity.
Under a third of households in the region give to charity (30.6%), ranking the South East fourth from bottom in a national league table, according to research commissioned by CAF. Of those households that do give, only 0.8% of income goes to charity. In comparison, the Northern Irish are the most generous – 52.4% of households donate, with the proportion of income at 1.5%.
John Thurley, Director of National Giving Week, said: “This is the first time such a campaign has been tried anywhere in the UK. We believe the KM Group’s well established commitment to its communities will really make a difference to how people give to charity.
CAF’s figures are based on its analysis of figures in the government’s annual Expenditure and Food Survey 2003 carried out by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on a sample of 7,850 households.
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.