Opinion

Making the most of christmas

Fundraising | Alan Hawkes | 1 Dec 2007

Fundraisers are failing their organisations by not setting their sights higher when it comes to getting their fair share of income from charity Christmas cards, argues Alan Hawkes.

When you buy your Christmas cards this year, will they be charity Christmas cards? And will you have made sure you maximised the amount of the sale price that goes to charity, by buying directly from a specialist charity card seller such as Card Aid, Cards for Good Causes or Studio51.

Or will you have popped into a high street chain, bought a box of cards labelled ‘charity’ and thought that you’ve done your bit for good causes this Christmas, even though you probably realised that as little as 10 per cent of the sale price would go to charity.

I’ve been in the greetings card industry for 25 years – I am a former vice president of the Greetings Card Association – and I have been saddened throughout that time at how little reaches charities. What I can’t understand is why charities let the card retailers get away with it.

In an episode of the BBC TV series Hustle earlier this year, the team of con artists set out to take down a titled woman who was defrauding charities by staging expensive ‘charity’ events, making a nominal donation, and creaming the rest for herself. I think there is a rather obvious analogy with charity Christmas cards. But that is not the analogy I want to explore here.

What I thought was really enlightening was the way the Hustle team spoke about the charities involved. One of the team said: “Of course, the charities won’t complain because they are grateful for any money they can get.”

One of my new friends in the charity sector told me that it was great drama but of course charities are more professional than this and would complain, even though they may be getting a decent amount of cash out of the deal.

Apparently that’s not the case with the niche area of cause-related marketing known as charity Christmas cards. Here, fundraisers are perfectly happy to take the scraps while someone else claims the lion’s share.

When I sold my greetings cards company last year, I got to wondering about how to change this state of affairs and the obvious answer is that you sell the cards online and cut out the retailer.

But I am also on a kind of crusade. I want to make sure that, within five years, every Christmas card sold in the UK is a charity Christmas card. And not just a ‘nominal’ charity card – one that actually gives a substantial donation to charities.

To do that we have to raise awareness among the public of the most cost-effective ways to buy cards and we must also normalise charity card buying so that it becomes the accepted thing to buy cards and unacceptable if you don’t.

I want charity cards to be so normal that if you receive a Christmas card from a friend or relative and there is no charity donation attached, you’ll be saying something like: “I can’t believe cousin John didn’t send charity cards this year.”

As I said, one of my ambitions in starting Studio51 is to change public awareness and behaviour and that’s why I was keen meet with the Institute of Fundraising earlier this year and push for just such a campaign to the public (see news page 6).

But we can’t ask the public to do one thing while we in the charity sector do something else. We can’t tell the public to buy direct from charities or specialist card suppliers while at the same time implicitly endorsing card publishers who pass on tiny percentages.

Charities have to play their part. They must not to undersell their brands to companies who will receive disproportionately more in increased sales than they will return as a financial donation. I have heard fundraisers complain that asking for a £2 a month donation undervalues charities’ propositions. I believe the same is true of charity Christmas cards. A 10 per cent donation on a pack of cards undervalues the charity, the cause and the person who buys the cards.

Alan Hawkes is founder and managing director of Studio51, an online charity Christmas card retailer

Tweet

Directory: studio 51
Who's Who: Alan Hawkes