Oi! You! Give to my charity. NOW! – Can you guilt-trip people into giving?

Howard Lake | 11 May 2009 | Blogs

I saw a charity infomercial a few weeks back. A person looked out of the screen and said directly to the viewing audience that 50 per cent of the people watching would not give money to this charity. He added: “Don’t be in that half of the population.”

Later in the infomercial there was a segment on the plight of a couple of the charity’s beneficiaries and a different person said: “If you agree with me that something must be done about this situation, then you MUST give.”

Blimey – strong stuff. Here were two people representing a charity telling me that I must give. In fact, they were trying to guilt-trip me into giving, weren’t they? There were bound to have been complaints about this.

So I checked with the charity how many complaints they’d received.

None. Not a single complaint.

The charity was Comic Relief and what I described happened during the televised Red Nose Day. The first person, the guy imploring us to be part of the morally-correct half of the audience, was David Tennant; the person telling us we must give was Annie Lennox after she had reported on a family in southern Africa that had been devastated by HIV/Aids.

Personally, I’ve got no particular problem with this. The world is fully of wrongs and most of us don’t do nearly enough to try to put those wrongs right. So why shouldn’t some people confront us with our contribution to making the world a better place and question us directly about whether we are doing enough? If we think we already are doing enough, then that’s great, we can decline the request to contribute more with no feelings of guilt whatsoever. If we feel we’re not doing enough, then that’s an issue for us to deal with. Just don’t shoot the messenger for bringing it up.

However, I wonder if there’s a double standard here. Comic Relief confirmed to me they received no complaints about these two incidents.

But I am pretty sure that the FRSB’s phone lines would have been in meltdown had an ‘ordinary’ charity fundraiser or, heaven forefend, a chugger (gasp!) said such a thing.

Why would it be that the public would accept such directness about their charitable giving from celebrities but probably would not accept it from a charity employee? Although this is a hypothetical conjecture, I don’t think my intuition is far off the mark.

I suspect it’s got something to do with the different types of relationships the public has with celebrities and charities.

Celebrities are better than us. We worship them and give them cult status because they achieve things we could never even aspire to – even if it’s just being useless on the Apprentice or Big Brother.

We are truly grateful for the patronage of celebrities. This usually manifests itself as their letting us follow them on Twitter or signing an autograph in Leicester Square. But another consequence of our celebrity fixation is that we confer on them an authority to lecture us that we’ll rarely challenge (Bono, anyone?). This extends to them telling us who to give to and when to give.

Charities – and charity workers – on the other hand, are not held in much awe by the mass of the public. Charity workers don’t patronise us. Instead we, the public, patronise them. We choose when to give; we don’t like them asking us to give. They don’t tell us what to do; we tell them what to do.

So we’ll tolerate celebs guilt tripping us into giving but not professional fundraisers.

This Comic Relief episode leads us into a much wider debate about the nature and use of guilt in fundraising, because the level of permissible guilt-inducement in fundraising is something that’s poorly understood and I don’t think has ever really been explored in depth.

You’ve only got to look at the IoF’s consultation on enclosures in mail packs a couple of years ago. The guilt issue was central to this. And yet while the working party and respondents to the consultation were trying to work out whether there was too much guilt involved in DM enclosures, there was nothing they could refer to that gave a benchmark about how much guilt is already used in fundraising and how much is acceptable – or even what is meant by ‘guilt’.

As with so many of the conceptual issues that underpin the fundraising profession, those making the rules about DM enclosures had to make it up as they went along.

So perhaps the use of guilt – or rather the management of guilt – is something that the fundraising sector should look at in more detail.

We might decide that no guilt inducement is allowed at all, even from the likes of David Tennant and Annie Lennox. But I doubt that would happen. We may not care to admit it, but guilt is ever-present in fundraising, because the very nature of asking someone to give forces them to look at how much they are giving, or not giving, already. And they might not be comfortable with what they see.

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.