One of the key themes at this week's Gathering of Social Leaders was how trusted the charity sector really is. David Ainsworth explores the issue.
A lot of people talked about trust at the Acevo Gathering of Social Leaders earlier this week.
Ben Page, chief executive of the polling firm Ipsos Mori, told the conference that charities continue to score well on his organisation's trust barometer. Around two thirds of people say they trust the sector, and that charities have just gone past priests in the trustworthiness stakes.
But both charities minister Nick Hurd and Acevo chair Lesley-Anne Alexander suggested that the public don’t really understand charities – have no idea what they actually do – and that therefore the relatively high level of trust the sector continues to enjoy is based on a fragile foundation.
I didn’t find myself feeling too sanguine about the Ipsos Mori figures.
First, two thirds isn’t that high. If one in three people in the UK don’t trust charities – think they’re disreputable in some way - that’s actually quite a lot.
Second, I don’t really believe these results anyway. When people are asked questions about trust, their answers have been shown again and again to be unreliable.
Everybody says they trust doctors. Everybody says they don’t trust journalists. But look what happened when the MMR scandal hit the newspapers a few years ago, and doctors dismissed it as nonsense. It was not the doctors people believed, but the Daily Mail. *
And when the newspapers told us charity chief executives were paid too much, and charities said they weren’t (although not with any great fervour, to be honest), it was the papers people believed.
When Ipsos Mori started asking people whether they trust charities to actually do anything – help communities, raise issues in Parliament, look after the poor – you discover that they think charities are pretty hopeless. The only thing they trust charities to do well is raise money.
A significant proportion don’t trust charities to put their cash to good use – they think charities waste money on salaries, on administration and on fundraising. Almost as many don’t trust charities to explain how money is spent. And quite a lot don’t trust charities to deliver public services.
In short, when people say they trust charities, don’t trust them.
* The doctors were right about MMR, by the way. This video summarises it quite nicely.
