Gareth Jones looks back at the past few months of charity-battering media coverage. 

It never rains but it pours. As if the charity sector hadn’t suffered enough negative press coverage in 2015, the year was rounded off with no less than three newspaper splashes.

At least the Times was pretty balanced when it took on chief executive pay, highlighting some questionable examples while arguing that sizeable salaries at very large, complex charities can be justified. However, its “story” about charities contacting relatives of recently deceased people in order to fulfil legacy bequests was astonishingly weak.

Meanwhile, probably the biggest stink was caused by our friends at the Telegraph, who decided to give front-page prominence to a flawed report accusing charities of not spending enough on charitable activities. Aside from highlighting the low editorial standards at the Telegraph these days, along with how far a wealthy self-publicist is willing to ignore reasoned argument in order further their agenda, there were a couple of useful things to arise from the fallout.

The first regards the composition of the Charity Commission’s new online register of charities. Gina Miller, author of the aforementioned report, justified her use of a basic “charitable spending” percentage with the fact that the Commission is featuring this same figure prominently on its new beta site. I called for the Commission to remove this in a blog, and along with others who have concerns, await a decision from the regulator.

The other useful development was that it provided another opportunity to consider how charities respond to such attacks. There was certainly an impressive roll-call of charities giving statements for the original Telegraph story, along with no-nonsense critiques from Sir Stephen Bubb of Acevo and the Charity Commission. These did quite an effective job of casting doubt on the veracity of the report by sheer weight of numbers, but, perhaps due to time constraints, none quite explained in explicit terms why so-called “non-charitable” spending is justified and necessary.

Meanwhile, I found myself springing into action that Monday morning to speak with Nick Ferrari on LBC radio, presumably because none of the charities concerned were available. I gather LBC has a habit of springing short-notice interview requests on people, and no doubt most charities would want their staff to receive a thorough PR briefing before subjecting them to the rigours of talk radio, but some risks need to be taken.

Charitable spending ratios and CEO salaries are nuanced issues which can be hard to justify in a rigorous yet accessible way. But charities must redouble their efforts to speak in simple terms that will achieve cut-through with members of the public. And they should accept all broadcast opportunities when they arise in order to reach the more sceptical audiences.