Charities should take a "bold" approach to transparency because it builds trust with donors and encourages them to give more, a fundraising director told Civil Society Media's first Fundraising Live conference last week.
In a panel session entitled "What does transparency look like?" at last week’s conference, Nina Saffuri, fundraising director of War Child, and Alan Gosschalk, fundraising director of Scope, both said charities should be proactive in communication with donors.
Saffuri said her charity's “bold” approach to transparency helped build trust with donors. “We’re really direct about how we spend our money,” said Saffuri. “That is something we get a lot of compliments about from our donors.”
Saffuri also said that by “breaking down admin costs” on War Child’s website, the charity better helped donors understand where their money was going. This, in turn, not only encouraged regular donations but also helped attract new ones.
Gosschalk said that charities needed to be up front and open in their communications because when doubts take hold “in the minds of donors and journalists”, negative stories and scrutiny tend to follow.
“People assume that when you don’t want to show something to them, that you’re hiding that information for a bad reason," he said.
Gosschalk said the charity sector needed to communicate better with donors.
“Transparency is about good stuff as well as about bad stuff,” Gosschalk said. “There are a load of good things that charities have communicated about really poorly.”
Both Saffuri and Gosschalk said that greater co-operation and communication between separate charities was needed in order to combat negative press.
“When one charity is really scrutinised,” said Saffuri, in relation to a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary last year about telephone fundraising, “then we all as a sector are being judged and scrutinised.”
Saffuri said charities should be able to present a more unified front to scandals, while still staying true to their causes.
Gosschalk argued that a better way of dealing with scrutiny lay with the Understanding Charities Group, which aims to better educate the public and the media about the way charities are regulated and run, and which he is a member of.
