Public trust in charities has rebounded since January this year but still remains over 10 percentage points lower than just before the last general election, new research from nfpSynergy suggests.

In July this year, the research agency polled 1,000 people aged 16 and over who are representative of the British public. It’s a survey nfpSynergy has run throughout the last five years, since 2006, and claims to be the largest and longest dataset in existence concerning trust in charities.

Trust in charities hit a high of 70 per cent in January 2010, before the May 2010 election, before diving to a low of 53 per cent in January 2011. It rallied to 59 per cent in the most recent poll, meaning charities are currently the third most trusted public institution, behind only the armed forces and the NHS.

However, the results also suggest that trust in charities is a highly volatile asset, its level of volatility beaten only by trust in banks. Trust in charities has see-sawed from an all-time low of 42 per cent in July 2007 to the 70 per cent high of January 2010 – a high-low variance of 28 per cent – while trust in banks has recorded a variance of 29 per cent over the five-year polling period.

nfpSynergy’s driver of ideas, Joe Saxton, said the results demonstrate that the Charity Commission’s statutory duty to build public trust in the sector, imposed as part of the Charities Act 2006, is not enough on its own.

“Despite trust in charities rallying after a post-election slump that might have been fuelled by factors such as suspicions over the Big Society concept, and government funding cuts – such charitable trust is also inherently relatively volatile, and cannot be taken for granted,” Saxton said.

“The task cannot be left just to the Charity Commission. Charities need a better understanding of what influences trust and, above all, we need a sector-wide strategy to establish trust on a more stable footing.”

(See research slides below)