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Christian groups claim discrimination in Big Give match offer 1

Fundraising | Celina Ribeiro | 6 Jan 2009

Christian charities have accused The Big Give of pulling the plug on last week’s matched donation offer to Christian groups because its owner, the agnostic Reed Foundation, did not want to give the lion’s share of the cash to religious organisations.

The website’s funders could now be facing legal action, with one of the two aggrieved charities reportedly in consultation with lawyers.

Nexus Trust and Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), who both registered to receive donations on The Big Give website, say they were told by representatives of the site that the Reed Foundation, who had put up a £1m match fund offer, shut down the website after it became apparent that donations were heavily flowing towards Christian groups.

The pound-for-pound offer was released by The Big Give at 10am on Monday 1 December, but was shut down after reports of unexpectedly high usage. It was relaunched the next day, with the total £1m pot going in less than an hour of the offer being active over the two days.

Jon Brooks, managing director of The Big Give, insisted that it was high traffic numbers and the failure of the site’s capping technology that prompted the shut-down, not the level of money going to Christian groups.

Dave Silber, head teacher at the Nexus Academy of Music (a function of the Christian organisation the Nexus Trust), told Professional Fundraising that it had initially been confirmed to him that the Nexus Trust had reached the advertised maximum match amount - £20,000 - however, in a phone call that came on Tuesday morning after students of the academy were celebrating their fundraising effort, he was told by Brooks that it was not the case.

“[Brooks] said what happened is in the first few minutes they saw all the money going out, and they saw where it was going to and, in his words: ‘the Reed Foundation is an agnostic organisation and didn’t want the lion’s share of the money going to Christian causes’,” said Silber.

Silber said Brooks informed him that instead of having a £20,000 maximum match fund limit per charity, The Big Give was now placing a £20,000 limit on ‘causes’, with £20,000 the maximum amount all registered Christian charities could receive as a whole.

“Everybody that works in the sector knows that charities and causes are completely different things,” said Silber.

Brooks confirmed that some Christian causes were banded together for the purposes of the £20,000 but that the decision to change from charity to cause applied only to “charities that promote Christian faith” and did not apply to organisations like Christian Aid which have other missions such as development.

He said that it had always been the intention of the Reed Foundation to restrict the funds in such a way, but conceded that there were “misunderstandings” as to how it came across.

“We didn’t want to have one group of charities running away with it. It wanted to be fair,” said Brooks. In the end, he said The Big Give was pleased that the money was distributed to “a wide range of charities”.

Silber’s organisation had contacted its entire database and organised donors in the UK, North America and Australia to donate to the website when it went live at 10am. The organisation was attempting to raise £40,000 for a disabled access ramp to the school and had expanded its internet facilities to help supporters donate from its own office.

In the minutes before the site was shut down last Monday, Silber said that at least £8,000 worth of donations were successfully processed through its own computers and that he had talked another donor through a £5,000 donation over the phone. While the organisation is still trying to get figures on how much of its donations were finally processed through The Big Give, early estimates suggest that all but £4,100 of the money donated to the Nexus Trust was returned to donors.

Christian Solidarity Worldwide has already issued an email to its supporters condemning the actions of The Big Give.

“We are deeply aggrieved by this situation and the discriminatory treatment of Christian organisations and are determined to seek justice on this matter,” the email reads.

Fine print

The Big Give’s ‘double your donation’ website features the caveat: “The Reed Foundation reserves the right to cease or limit the matched funding delivered to any charity or sector and to terminate the matched donations at any time”, but Silber alleges this had not been made clear to organisations who had prepared for the offer in good faith.

“It is our feeling that at the very least The Big Give are guilty of total misrepresentation in their rules and promotion of the event,” he said.

If the organisation had been aware of either the alleged aversion to Christian organisations, or the intention to divide up £20,000 per causal group, Silber said that Nexus Trust would not have invested as much time – including that of students taken out of class and the “thousands” of text messages sent out to remind supporters who had pledged toward the £20,000 match fund.

The whole affair, Silber claims, has damaged his organisation’s relationship with its supporters and also diverted it from regular fundraising activity during what is normally their most profitable time of the year.

“The next time we try to run a campaign, the first thought from [donors] is going to be ‘I wonder if it’s legitimate’. There’s nothing Jon [Brooks] can do to get that back for us,” he said.

Legal threats

Brooks told PF that there have been “veiled” threats of legal action and is concerned that “if charities that don’t like it start suing funders then we won’t get any more funders”.

Corinna Loges, director of communication at CSW, indicated that the organisation would be taking matters further.

“I am not ready to accept the injustice that I feel we have been confronted with and will continue to seek justice for Christian Solidarity Worldwide and other organisations affected by this treatment,” she said.

“The question arises whether the Reed Foundation ought to legally honour the promise and not default on it.”

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Who's Who: Celina Ribeiro