An organisation to lobby for charity interests and educate the public about charities’ need to fundraise, pay competitive salaries and grow large is being set up in the United States, with plans to bring on international partners in the future.

Author of Uncharitable Dan Pallotta (pictured) mooted the idea of creating an international charity defence league last year, an organisation that could prevent and respond to public and politician outcry about things like executive remuneration and overhead ratios, but the group is set to start out first as a US organisation.

The Charity Defence Council will focus first on educating and responding to the media and then will start raising funds for a massive public-facing advertising campaign, Pallotta told Fundraising magazine in an interview to be published in the upcoming September issue.

He foresees that the group will eventually gather enough steam to push sweeping legislation through the US legislature, protecting the rights and promoting the activity of charities and social enterprises. The organisation is not yet operational, but has been incorporated and is awaiting government approval of its tax-exempt status.

While Pallotta intends for the group to partner with organisations around the world, including the UK, for the same purpose, the Charity Defence Council has been set up as a US body first because US grantmakers were more amenable to supporting a local initiative.

“There needs to be a leadership organisation that takes [public education and lobbying] on as its principal goal,” said Pallotta.

Measuring effectiveness

Although there has been changing attitudes about moving away from looking at costs as a measure of effectiveness within charities and the chattering classes, Pallotta said that argument has yet to trickle down to the donor on the street, who still sees overheads as the ultimate guide to charity effectiveness and worthiness.

“We have not won any argument with the general public yet. In fact the general public doesn’t even know we’re having this discussion. It’s important that [the sector] is having this discussion when once we were not, but now the next step is: how do we engage the general public?”

With financial commentators predicting a possible return to recession in the US and globally, Pallotta said that despite some suggestions at the onset of the last global recession in 2008 that this crisis would put charities at the forefront of society, the economic environment has set charities back further.

“If anything, a negative thing came out of the downturn: charities were required to tighten their belts even further. That was the last piece of guidance we needed,” he said.

“People are saying ‘We need charities to more than ever and those charities are going to have to sacrifice more than ever’. That’s just compounding the problem we had before. Instead of asking them to sacrifice more, you’ve got to start to give them more economic freedom or they’ll never be able to deal with these social problems.”

Dan Pallotta will be delivering a plenary at the International Fundraising Congress in Holland on 21 October.