Donations to largest 500 charities down by £70m
Howard Lake | 11 July 2011 | News
Voluntary donations to the UK’s 500 largest charities dropped by £70 million in real terms last year, according to this year’s edition of The Charity Market Monitor 2011. This has left “many good causes little better off than they were five years ago”, according to new research, which is published by the ESRC Centre for Charitable Giving and Philanthropy at Cass Business School, and CaritasData, which tracks changes in charity fundraising and other income.
For the second year running, voluntary donations to the largest charities have dropped, down by 1.1% to £6.05 billion in 2009/10.
Of course, the pattern is not consistent across all the charities survey. Donations to many social causes have dropped, yet animal welfare charities enjoyed a 4.4% increase in income to £426 million. Animal welfare organisations similarly saw their total legacy income rise from £217 million to £230 million, and international causes and hospices also saw legacy increases. However, children’s, disability and cancer charities saw real falls.
Total income for the top fundraising charities fell by 0.5%, worth a real loss of £59 million. This means that income raised from voluntary donations is just 0.7% higher in real terms in 2009/10 than it was in 2005/06, and total income just 1.5% higher.
Nor were the very largest charities immune. For the first time, their voluntary income dropped by 1.8% compared with the top 500 average of 1.1%.
Grants from trusts and foundations were down too by 1.7%, not least because their investment income had dropped in value by 10%.
Fortunately charitable legacies have increased to £1.4 billion in total, showing a real recovery of 1.4%.
Services and ex-services welfare charities are also bucking the downward trend: they enjoyed a real increase of 6.2% in income, with their income from charitable legacies increasing from £33 million to £36 million.
The top three largest charities in the study are Cancer Research UK, British Heart Foundation and Oxfam. The latter two swapped places in the ranking, with Oxfam having held second place since 2006.
The author of the report is Professor Cathy Pharoah, Co-Director of the ESRC Centre for Charitable Giving and Philanthropy at Cass Business School.
She said: “The results of this research show that charities are subject to a pincer movement with their donated and investment incomes reaching a low point just as government spending cuts begin to hit their budgets. The evidence suggests that giving cannot fully substitute for public spending because donors have different priorities. If people want charities to play a stronger part in empowering local communities, then giving will need to grow and support a wider range of causes.”
This is the fourth edition of the Charity Market Monitor. As well as reporting on the annual finances of the UK’s top 500 charities, and the
charitable spending of the major corporate and trust donors, it also compares results with the previous year, and provides analysis to help charities plan funding strategies in the new funding environment.
www.wlrstore.com/cmm
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.