Charity Retail Association ‘not yet alarmed’ by rise in negative media coverage

Howard Lake | 16 January 2014 | News

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• Charity Retail Association
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The Charity Retail Association has said that it has noticed, but is not yet alarmed by, an increase in negative media coverage about charity shops over the past year, after two separate articles attacking the prices charged by charity shops appeared in the Observer and Daily Mail at the end of December.
Set in the context of increasing levels of hostile media and public scrutiny of charities over the past year – which Acevo’s CEO Sir Stephen Bubb has described as the worst for 10 years – these two articles could either have passed under the radar or heralded the next charity target for the media.
“There has been a feeling that there has been more criticism of charity shops,” Wendy Mitchell, head of policy and public affairs, told UK Fundraising.

“The two most common themes for media criticism are the [perceived negative] impact that charity shops have on the high street and business rate relief. Until now, pricing has not been an issue so these two articles were a surprise.”

Alan Gosschalk, director of fundraising at Scope and chair of the ImpACT Coalition, described the Mail and Observer articles as “symptomatic of a wider sense of increased scrutiny of charities, and in particular an aversion to things that feel a bit too corporate.

“I think that much of the problem is a lack of transparency and us proactively explaining to the public how charity works and how money ends up on the ground, helping people.”

Communicating the social value of charity shops

Taking proactive action – as Gosschalk recommends – is exactly what the Charity Retail Association plans to do to respond to any further media hostility. It will draw on extensive research commissioned from think tank Demos to construct arguments showing the social value that charity shops bring to communities.

“We have been looking at how to articulate the positive benefits that charity shops bring, not just in terms of fundraising, but measuring the wider social impact they have on communities,”

Mitchell says.

“We are not alarmed by [increasing levels of negative media], but we wouldn’t have put this level of focus on it if it wasn’t something to be a bit concerned about, which is why we have put our resources into building the evidence through the Demos report.”

This report – Give something back: the social value of charity shops – was published in November 2013. Among its recommendations were:

•  The CRA should work with expert partners to develop a toolkit that charity retailers could use to quantify and present their social value
•  The CRA should stimulate discussion about social value among charities to promote strategic thinking about the issues involved
• Charity shop should translate what individual shops’ fundraising means in terms of tangible outcomes and advertise this on shop fronts – something that some charities now do: British Heart Foundation shops, for example, display posters explaining how money raised in that shop supports local services.

CRA is submitting a blog to the Guardian Voluntary Sector network in response to the Observer article.

Observer article ‘not part of anti-charity agenda’

Almost 1,500 comments were appended to the Observer article. But Tess Reidy, the journalist who wrote it, told UK Fundraising she did not consider her article to be part of a wider anti-charity agenda and she had not researched other areas of charity controversy in preparation for it.
“My article was nothing to do with charities in general – I don’t have a problem with charities paying large salaries to staff and I understand the view that charity shops are there to raise money,” she said. “But I wrote it following conversations I had had with people who visit them and I think that charity shops ought to serve the community as well.”
Mitchell said that, contrary to what both articles claim, the average transaction in charity shops is low, with high-value items being the exception.
Photo: gingerblokey on Flickr.com
 
 

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.