Charities Aid Foundation publishes trends about giving to disaster appeals
Howard Lake | 17 October 2011 | News
As the DEC announces that its current East Africa Appeal has raised £72 million, the largest amount for a food crisis in its 45-year history, the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) has published findings from its monitoring of appeals.
CAF’s research team has been monitoring the public response to major disaster appeals over the past six years. The second weekend after a major appeal has launched CAF commissions research amongst over 1,000 members of the public aged 16+ about their reaction.
Key trends from the research include:
• the proportion of donors giving online has tripled over the past six years, from 7% of donors giving online for the tsunami in 2004/5, to 23% of donors giving in this way to the current East Africa Appeal
• on average almost half of those giving to disasters give in cash (48%) meaning that they might be missing out on Gift Aid which has the potential to increase the value of donations by a quarter if given by a UK taxpayer
• women are significantly more likely to give to a disaster appeal than men. On average 55% of those who donated were women and 45% were men
those aged 65+ are more than twice as likely to give than 16-24 year olds (23% vs. 11%)
• for both the Haiti and East Africa Appeals, at least 80% of donors gave because they felt international assistance was essential
• television coverage is essential in motivating people to give: 71% of people who gave to the Asia-Pacific, Burma, Haiti and East Africa Appeals were motivated to give because of images they saw on TV.
www.cafonline.org
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.