Charities are misleading the public by not correcting assumptions that they may have about the way they work, Vicky Browning, director of CharityComms, said yesterday.
She was speaking on a panel discussion which asked if charities have “willingly misled the public about how they work” at NCVO’s Evolve conference, alongside Tris Lumley, director of development at New Philanthropy Council, and Richard Spencer, who was until April head of supporter development at the RSPB and is now a consultant.
The panellists agreed that charities were misleading the public to some extent.
Browning said that charities do have a good relationship with the public but that can’t be taken for granted. She said that thinking big issues will just blow over won’t work and “we can’t afford to be complacent”.
She said: “I don’t think we are deliberately misleading the public but there are assumptions that we have chosen not to challenge.”
She added that people are asking questions about the sector and it needs to be able to respond.
According to Browning charities, alongside MPs, bank managers and the church, are among a group of “sacred cows” that have historically seemed untouchable, but that is no longer the case.
She said that in the media, coverage of charities is of “heroes or villains” and there is not enough out there about why it is the way it is. She said that the sector should not only be responding to criticisms, but should go further to improve the understanding of how it operates.
Lumley: charities should improve communication and data sharing
Lumley said the sector is “selective about what we tell the public”.
He added that charities need to be more open about communicating failtures as well as the things they have done well.
He also criticised charities for not sharing the data that allows them to work well, and for treating “knowledge as something that we should hoard for our competitive advantage, not something that we should share for the greatest range of beneficiaries”.
Referencingy the different ways the sector treats of administration costs by the sector, for example when charities state on their websites that a certain percentage goes on its core aims, he said this implies that the remaining percentage is wasted.
He said: “We miss the opportunity to educate and have a longer term discussion about what charities do. Everyone here today at the Evolve conference are overhead costs. We invest in things that our important to improve our understanding and change society for the better. We need to be able to talk to the public so they understand what we need to do.”
Lumley went on to say that charities are too often guilty of chasing funding.
He said: “Even when you hear organisations who might all privately say that a direction in policy is the wrong way to go. You still see those organisations respond to the contract that came as a result of that policy direction to win the bit of funding that is left in that increasingly fragmented decreasing pot, rather than coming together to challenge the original policy.”
Fundraising regulation
Spencer spoke about the ongoing debates around fundraising, saying because the number of people who give to charity on a regular basis is relatively small, charites risk over asking the same people.
He said that the FRSB recommendations do not help address this, instead they just reduce the number of people that charities can ask.
He also said: “Charities are unwittingly misleading the public about how they work and as demand on the sector to deliver more impact grows, it is a problem that is not going to go away.”
