One in eight Britons don’t give anything to charity
Howard Lake | 18 April 2014 | News
Almost one in eight British adults do not give any money to charity and don’t intend to start in the next year, new market research conducted for the Charities Aid Foundation has found. But in the north of England, it’s nearly one out of every five who are not charity donors.
The survey of 2,045 adults, conducted by ComRes in January, found that 13% of people “do not currently spend” on charitable giving and have no plans to do so, with the 18% of people in the north of the country who don’t give being significantly higher than in other regions. ‘Significantly’ in research terms means that the difference in the figures cannot be accounted for by chance variations in the dataset, meaning that it is a genuine or ‘significant’ difference.
Of the 87% who do donate to charity, most, 56%, plan to keep their giving at the same level as last year, while 18% plan to cut back on their charitable giving. Just 8% are budgeting for an increase.
Eleven per cent of southerners say they plan to increase their giving over the coming 12 months, significantly more that the 6% of northerners. However the proportions of people who plan to cut back this year are fairly constant across the regions. And while 16% of northerners say they’ll decrease their charitable giving compared to 19% of southerners, the difference was not significant
A third (31%) of those who said they would increase their giving say this is because they expect their financial situation to improve. Twenty-one per cent say they plan to give more because they were asked by a charity. However, the numbers are too small to be able to draw any conclusions about regional differences in how people respond to fundraising asks.
No differences between men and women
There are no significant difference between the giving intentions of men and women. But people under 34 are significantly more likely to say they will increase their giving and significantly less likely to say they will decrease it compared to those who are 35 and over.
Previous studies have found that the percentage of Britons who gave something to charity at least once a year have reached the 90s. The commonly accepted figure that around only 55-60 per cent of Britons give to charity comes from CAF/NCVO’s annual UK Giving report/Civil Society Almanac. But this refers to the number of people who donated during the research period, which is typically one month to six weeks. The World Giving Index published in December 2013 put the number of Britons who donate in a typical month at 76%.
‘More likely to cut back drinking than charity donations’
ComRes’s research for CAF also examined people’s spending intentions on things such as holidays, clothes and nights out. CAF concludes that people are “reluctant” to cut back on their charitable giving, being more likely to say that they will decrease their spending on takeaways (30%) and going out for a drink (25%) than on charity donations (18%).
John Low, Chief Executive of the Charities Aid Foundation, said:
Advertisement
“It is encouraging that so many people are planning to maintain or increase their charitable giving this year.
“Although there are glimmers of hope in the economy, many of us don’t feel any the richer for it and this is particularly true outside of London and the South East. It’s clear from our findings there is a North-South divide in the economic recovery, reflected in people’s attitudes to charitable giving.”
British piggy bank by Micha Klootwijk 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.