Donors and the world today

Professional Fundraising

August 2007

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In this edited extract from nfpSynergy’s new report, The 21st Century Donor, Michele Madden and Joe Saxton look at the cultural and social trends in the wider world that will impact on fundraising and donors�?lives

Culture shift 1: The growth of irrationality and the cult of the individual

The world is not as rational as we would like to believe, where facts and importance set the agenda for our media consumption. We live in an irrational world where brands, fashion, celebrities, emotions, nosiness and huge choice drive our daily lives and viewing habits. We are governed by our hearts not our heads.

A generation ago, what we consumed in news terms was limited to a handful of TV stations and a limited number of newspapers. Now there has been an explosion in news. In 1982 it would have taken just 18 hours to consume all the TV and radio output of news for a single day. Today it would take three weeks. The growth has not been in hardedged foreign reporting or sharp political insights, but in soft news: celebrities, sport, fashion and entertainment.

Even mainstream media can become intoxicated with a sportsman’s broken bone (Wayne Rooney’s toe in the run-up to the World Cup) or the fate of one missing child (the terrible story of Madeleine McCann). This style of media has implications for the world of donors and fundraising. Charities tend to believe that their appeals must be rational, with the more people helped the greater the appeal. Far from it �?facts in some studies have been shown to be a turn-off for donors �?a single compelling case study is often far more powerful. The way society produces and consumes media has a profound impact on the way that donors will consume information about charities. If charity appeals are too boring, too dry, too factual and too passionless many consumers are likely to be disinterested and disenfranchised.

Culture shift 2: The rise of mass affluence, free time and the importance of feeling good

There are more and more people who are mass affluent �?as defined by liquid (non-property) assets of more than £50,000. Not only are the mass affluent on the increase, but so is the wealth of the population as a whole. Disposable income has doubled since the early 1980s, and the cost of housing, groceries, transport and leisure has fallen in real terms.

Alongside this increase in wealth (and decrease in costs) is a freeing up of people’s time. The amount of time spent (particularly by women) on domestic chores has fallen dramatically over the last 40 years (farewell twin tub, hello ready meals).

The net result of all this is a significant portion of the population has more money and more time than ever before. And much of this time and money is spent on leisure and experiences: more foreign holidays, more weekends away, play stations, PCs, home cinema systems, and all that.

So the rise of mass affluence presents both challenges and opportunities. The opportunity is to persuade people with surplus money to spend it on a cause they care deeply about. The challenge is that competition between charities is negligible compared to competition with the other ways that people can spend their money. When even the richest households spend 99.5 per cent of their wealth on anything but charities, the 0.5 per cent for giving is a tiny portion of the whole.

The good news is that the evidence suggests people who have extra money are increasingly interested in spending it in a way that makes them feel good about themselves and realises their dreams about who they are, and the world in which they live.

So the challenge for fundraisers is simple. Giving money needs to be as rewarding and satisfying as buying the home cinema system or the new car. Giving money to a charity needs to do as much for tomorrow’s generation as leaving wealth to grandchildren. It needs to say something as powerful about the type of person they are or want to be, as buying a BMW or wearing a Rolex watch or a Gucci handbag. Charity brands will only need to be become more powerful and more distinctive �?because the commercial brands they compete with are just that.

Culture shift 3: The expectation of choice and the need for instant gratification

Choice is increasing in every area of our lives. We have massive choice every time we go to the supermarket, browse the internet, buy a mobile phone, pick a holiday, buy a book and just about every aspect of our lives. Despite all this increase in choice most of us are comfortable with the level of choice we have �?though older people are more likely to want limited choice.

We all have our own strategies for dealing with choice. We buy the brands we known and love. We shop on price. We listen to friends�?recommendations. We use advisors to help mediate our choice (Which? Magazine, best buy lists in the Sunday papers). We pick at random or on superficial choices like colour or style. We stick with the choices we made before. In short as a result of the mushrooming of choice over the last ten years we, as a society, are not just used to choice �?we now expect it.

Ironically, although charities tend to fret about the 180,000 charities to compete with, this rarely delivers choice for the giving public. We survive the choice in our commercial buying because we understand how to differentiate between those choices (with the possible exception of washing powders). We use price or brand or prior experience or recommendations or Fairtrade or a host of other methods to help us navigate the volume of products we have to deal with on a daily basis.

The second insidious effect that the rise of choice brings is its impact on what punters expect their money will do. Go shopping on the internet or in a supermarket and there are decisions about the best value return £20 will deliver �?and whether the purchase is worth it.

Go giving to a charity and not only is there rarely instant gratification of seeing a job well done, but charities will often have many caveats about the effectiveness of their work: it takes time, it’s very complicated, we will spend it in a basket of ways and so on.

Nowhere is the disparity more keenly felt than on some of the biggest issues that face the planet. If you want to tackle climate change, HIV/aids, trade inequalities or third world debt, there are numerous agencies who would love to take your money. But whether your donation will be effective is totally uncertain �?the issues are so huge, so complicated, so long-term and so hard to tackle.

It’s no wonder that many people feel a sense of learned helplessness when confronted with donating money to tackle these issues. £20 spent on a couple of DVDs may not stop climate change �?but at least it will definitely provide a couple of evening’s entertainment.

Culture shift 4: The rise of the baby boomer and the demise of World War

The baby boomers are coming. That burst of population born roughly between 1947 and 1960: a response to years of Second World War hardship and post-war austerity. But baby boomers aren’t just about a spike in population numbers. They are also about a change in attitudes compared to the generation that came before them.

Baby boomers are more independent and liberal in their social attitude: they came of age in the swinging sixties. But they are also more demanding. Baby boomers tend not to accept authority in the way their parents did. They tend to expect the world to be the way they want it to be. They have less of a sense of duty compared to their parents.

As baby boomers creep towards retirement they will have more disposable income (perhaps the last generation for a while to have full pensions), be healthier and want to engage with charities in a way that impacts their lives.

Culture shift 5: The importance of the internet �?but not in a starring role

The commercial world has been revolutionised by the internet. The world of contacting and finding out about charities has been massively changed. But the world of fundraising and donors remains largely unchanged. There are a few charities that benefit hugely from the internet �?those who deal with disasters and emergencies overseas or anybody who has substantial numbers of runners in events like the London marathon.

But since the internet was created we have heard talk of a revolution in giving. We don’t believe that revolution has come yet �?and we don’t believe it ever will. There are several reasons for this.

Firstly, giving is not a rational activity. People don’t decide who to give on the basis of facts and ratios. They decide who to give based on the causes they care about or the charity brands that they have heard of and trust. Indeed some people give not because of any affiliation with the cause, but because they were asked by the right person at the right time. Face-to-face fundraising on the street works partly because of personal chemistry and attraction; as one fundraising director told us �?‘with an all male recruitment team, the number of young women donors we have recruited has gone up�?

The corollary of this is that there are few people who go off and search all the financial details of a charity before deciding to give to it. Giving is not like pensions or cars or washing machine. Not only is it much harder to compare the features of a charity but must people don’t want to work that hard. As somebody said in one of our focus groups ‘If they are a big name charity. They are a brand. I just trust them to do a good job�? However, no charity can afford to take this for granted.



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