People prefer to donate to charities run by ‘amateurs’ rather than salaried staff
Howard Lake | 28 October 2014 | News
A new survey by New Philanthropy Capital – Matter of Trust: What the Public Thinks of Charities and How it Affects Trust – found that 66 per cent of people said they would prefer to donate to charities “run by volunteers”. But less than a fifth (18 per cent) said they would rather give to charities they thought were “run by professionals”.
The survey of 1,000 plus people – conducted by IPSOS-Mori in March this year – also found that people would rather give to:
• small organisations (59 per cent) than large (25 per cent)
• organisations that are not involved in political issues (76 per cent) compared to those that are political (eight per cent)
• focused on providing services (70 per cent) rather than awareness raising (14 per cent).
Respondents were asked how much they knew about charities: 46 per cent reckoned they knew “a fair amount”, while 42 per cent admitted to “not very much”. The more people knew about charities the more they tended to trust them: 69% of people who said they knew ‘a great deal’ or ‘a fair amount’ about charities had high or medium trust in them.
The survey did not present responses (such as the preference to give to volunteer-run or staff-run charities) of people segmented according to their self-reported knowledge.
The survey also asked people to rate how much they trusted charities on an 11-point scale of 0-10. Thirty-five per cent of people rated their trust in charities as below the midpoint on the scale while 61 per cent rated their trust in charities above the mid-point (four per cent didn’t know).
The report begins with a quotation from former Minister for Civil Society Brooks Newmark MP which includes the phrase: “The important thing charities should be doing is sticking to their knitting and doing the best they can to promote their agenda, which should be about helping others.”
Image: trust by Tischenko Irina on Shutterstock.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.