Few Oxford Street shops visibly support charities, says Give as you Live
Howard Lake | 15 December 2014 | News
Only one in five shops in London’s main shopping street Oxford Street are visibly supporting charities, according to the online shopping site ‘with a heart’ Give as you Live.
The company commissioned research that explored the physical shops and websites of 45 major retailers on Oxford Street in October 2014.
Giving in-store
- Two stores (4%) had a charity collection tin
- Two (4%) had processes that promoted donating items to charity in return for a gift voucher
- Five (11%) had products in-store that generated donations to charity
Giving online
Charitable support was more in evidence on the retailers’ websites.
- 27 stores (60%) listed charities or good causes on their website, often on their CSR page
- 18 (40%) on the other hand did not list any charities or discuss charitable support anywhere on their website
- None of the stores offered online shoppers the chance to donate at checkout through methods like rounding-up to the nearest pound.
Annabelle Risdon, Head of Charity Partnerships at Give as you Live, explained why they undertook the research. She said:
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“We deliberately wanted the research to reflect what retailers are doing in store outside the national drives like The Poppy Appeal and Christmas campaigns – unfortunately, it turned out to be very little.
“Previous Give as you Live research from last year found that almost half of us would spend more money with a retailer if they donated to a charity. The same research found that eight in ten Brits believe that retailers should be doing more to support UK charities. Retailers could be increasing sales if their CSR efforts were more visible.”
She noticed that listing a retailer’s charitable activity on its website’s CSR page meant that the partnership was not as visible as it could be: you would have to be looking for it to find it.
Risdon added:
“We know that consumers want to see retailers giving back, so we’re calling on them to make more noise about the charities they support and the causes they fund.”
Give as you Live lets consumer compare prices and shop online from over 3,700 retailers and generate a percentage of their expenditure to the charity of their choice, at no extra cost to themselves. To date the site has raised over £5 million for UK charities.
Photo: Christian Mueller / 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.