Help donors choose which charities to support, says Saxton

Professional Fundraising

June 2008

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Charities are not doing enough to help their donors choose between them, according to Joe Saxton, driver of ideas at nfpSynergy.

In the opening plenary of the PF Conference on 21 May, Saxton said that compared to the multitude of choices consumers are offered in their everyday lives between brands of chocolate, mobile phones or cleaning products, charities rarely offer their donors anything to make it easy to choose between them.

He used five bottles of cleaning product to illustrate his point. While he said it was simple for a shopper to tell what ‘Hob Brite’ did compared to ‘Mr Muscle Bathroom Cleaner’, when he labelled each of the bottles as a major children’s charity and asked the audience to explain the difference between what they did, the majority could not.

“I think one of the difficulties is we have not provided for most people, in most situations, mechanisms for choosing between charities,” he said. “I think punters need and want to choose between charities, and when they say ‘I think there are too many charities in the sector’, that is code for ‘I don’t know how to choose between them’.”

Saxton went on to say that charities increasingly looked like an “out-of-date part of society” that had not changed at a fast enough pace. “One of the dangers is we have left people thinking what charities do is much the same as it was 20 years ago,” he said.

Charities should intertwine giving with living, he said. “The best fundraising is where people are not sure whether their motivation is for their benefit or for charities’ benefit,” he said, but added that fundraisers should create products that allowed people to know exactly how they should give and what they would get.

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