Beacon Briefing: "Charitable Giving Post Tsunami" held on 10th March, 2005

Presentation of Findings

I. Summary of the Charitable Aid Foundation Report

II. Introduction of Topics and Speakers

III. Conclusion

I can tell you that all of our speakers have been asked to confine their remarks to two minutes. I have absolutely no pretence of anticipation that they will do so, but that is a very good parameter, I think – two minutes is the length of one of the more generous reports that you actually see on the mainstream television news bulletin, and I hope that, by the time we’ve finished, we’ll have a very different news bulletin with all the different angles involved in the issues we are addressing tonight. The two minutes, by the way, should give us much more time for the discussion, because afterwards I’ll be very much looking for your comments, and your thoughts and your questions, either to stand alone or to bounce off our panel when they finish speaking. So, first of all Brendan, over to you sir.

The DEC and Managing the Money

Brendan Gormley
Chief Executive, Disasters Emergency Committee

I. The Role of the DEC

II. Solving the Unique Challenges of the Tsunami Appeal

The Role of the Media

W.F. Deedes
Journalist, Daily Telegraph

I. Preamble

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m old enough to remember, when big human disasters occurred in the world and went unreported. We knew nothing and so we gave nothing. Say what you like about the massive media coverage of the tsunami. We knew, we cared and we gave. We saw the suffering and the horror and the outcome was a staggeringly generous response from the public. And yes I think it could happen again. It happened years ago when Michael Buerk from the BBC told the world that about the famine in Ethiopia, and we got Band Aid.

II. Role of the Media

The question I was told to answer whether the media could do more to promote giving. Of course, it is never wise telling the media what to do; you’ll just make them resentful. Experiencing human emergencies convinces me that the definition of a perfect world is that the lead aid agencies give better value for money than the government do. Your money is more likely to go to grain and medicine than to the big men’s wives or landmines or a nest egg in a Swiss bank. Now, I’m personally in favour of the voluntary bodies which work in the business of overseas development.
What I’ve found, as one aspect of this, is the lead agencies are also, speaking as a journalist, a wonderful source of stories of what goes on in the world. My newspaper sometimes mentions them, and what they do for the world, and that indirectly taps purses and wallets. The newspaper gets the story, the aid organisation gets the publicity, public interest and/or sympathy is aroused - what’s wrong with that? That, indeed, is how a great number of the great overseas aid agencies operate and it works, and I’d be very interested to know, how much they actually do depend on the news media.

III. Conclusion

This way of working has been in existence for a long time, and it works for other charities too. But it does impose on charities the obligation of finding stories that will concern the interest of the media. But don’t pass it on immediately or I shall lose a number of scoops.

Encouraging Giving

Lord Bell of Belgravia
Chair, Chime Communications

I. Initiatives for Improved Giving
I’ve been involved in a whole series of initiatives to try to improve giving in this country over many, many years: Business in the Community, which Stephen O’Brien created; the Percent Club that Sir Marc Weinberg created. The Beacon Fellowship itself – its basic premise is to try to encourage giving to grow. I have to say that I think the charity world has become much more efficient at getting people to give money. I think Bill is quite right to talk about the impact of these big events. There have been quite a lot of them: some of them are tragic and terrible disasters, like the tsunami tragedy, but some of them are brilliantly organised events that can raise money, like Comic Relief – or the very creation of telethons in the first place. It’s a pity that we’re only left with Comic Relief in that classic model. I can tell you some good news about it, that it is raising a lot of money; it’s not experiencing donation fatigue, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that it was returning as much, if not more money than it did last year.
I do think there are probably three things that are worth doing to try to get more giving. They may not sound like the most deeply persuasive and ethical and moral arguments, because they’re not. One of them is that the easier you make it for people to give, the more you’ll get. What is quite clear from the tsunami disaster is that the Disasters Emergency Committee is a brilliant idea because it is a one-stop shop. It means people know they don’t have to go through the debate about who they should give the money to; they can give it to a central source that they trust. The fact that you can give by text, you can give by email, or by any other way possible is really only a modern version of collecting boxes – a more effective version. The easier you make it to give money, the better.

II. Effective Communication
I know nothing about what charities do, but I do know a bit about fundraising. I do think that charities should spend more time explaining what they do with the money. It has always struck me that probably the weakest part of most charities’ communication with their donors is what they actually do with the money. It tends to be rather calm, rather boring, and not at all very exciting. I think that one of the things that happened with the tsunami crisis is that as the money was given and the work started there, we did see really interesting televisual descriptions of what was happening. That’s an important element. One of the things the media might do, rather than help with fundraising, would be to help with communicating what charities actually achieve, by making the effects dramatic.
I do think that initiatives like the Beacon Fellowship are important and I hope there are more of them. This debate and this discussion is exactly what it’s all about, which is people talking about it. The more you talk about it, the more likely you are to achieve something.
I would just leave you with one thought, which is that I pray for the day when we get a government that doesn’t take any tax away from any charity, because I really can’t see any reason why they do. When we look at Gift Aid and various governments of any colour say that they give us an extra £50 million, it’s our money they’re actually giving back to us. In fact, they are giving to the charity that we wanted to give in the first place. About the most effective thing anyone can do is to persuade every politician you meet or come across to try to persuade whatever the government of the day may be to abolish income tax collection on all charitable donation and all charities.

Martyn Lewis
Thank you very much indeed. Now Stephen Ainger, of the Charities Aid Foundation, [inaudible], and he’s working his way up there. You have to persuade the Treasury as well. That’s the thing – you can persuade the politicians, but you can’t persuade the Treasury. I know you’re going to try to.

Balancing the Needs of the Charity Sector

Stephen Ainger
CEO, Charities Aid Foundation

I. The Bigger Picture
Thank you. I’m going to disagree with that as well. What is the bigger picture in the UK? What has been the impact on charities, and what will we have to do to help [be part of giving?] in three minutes?
Why are we talking about [riding out?] the culture of giving in the same breath as we are talking about the tsunami, where people have given so fantastically – 80% of adults? Surely this provides all the evidence we need of the warm generosity of the British public, and our constant worries about donor fatigue are exaggerated.
I must stay that the bigger picture is not so positive. Charitable giving in the UK in real terms has been about flat over the last 12 or 13 years. In fact, it declined through the 1990s, and went down with tax changes in 2000, but it has now back up to 1990 levels. ‘Flat in real terms’ means that, over the last 12 years, it has not kept pace with the growth in the UK economy. If you look at the GDP growth over the last 12 years, what it says is that we are giving a quarter less as a percentage of our wealth than we did 12 years ago. The proportion going to international is maintained at about 12%. Why is that so? Why is it that giving isn’t going up? It’s hard to say, but it is also a fact that wealthier donors – the higher-rate taxpayers – at last count 3.8 million of them – are not giving at the levels that we might expect. Picking up a previous point, some say that that’s related to the need for clearer reporting and clearer impact statements, but it is very hard to take a judgement as to exactly why that giving has been the way it is.

II. Public Response and the Media
Turning to the tsunami and the impact on the UK, we’ve said that the response from the public has been phenomenal, and the attention on that has turned into what is being achieved at the moment. The general public will need to be able to see the difference that money has created.
I don’t know whether I was alone in my observation of the wall-to-wall media coverage during the disaster, but toward the end it seemed that the media were deliberately avoiding reporting in detail on the impact of charitable support. Perhaps they were sensitive about dampening public enthusiasm. They were ready to cover the reality of government support and question the track record of previous situations, but they didn’t really do too much on what our impact was.
What is clear over the next few months is that we need to demonstrate the impact of that £350 million. It does not mean one or two trophy schools or orphanages, but a real, consolidated account of all that has been spent and delivered in support up to now and over the next few years. What will it achieve? Almost like a business plan, if you like. As I understand it, this is the first time that DEC have had such a long-term appeal, and it is a huge challenge.

III. Effect of a Single Event
Events such as 9/11 showed that a long-lasting impact on all giving brought about by a particular event is unlikely. 9/11 in America did not lead to a general and sustained rise is charitable commitment. In fact, overall annual giving in the US for that year did not rise, despite the huge amount going to specific agencies. Even now in the UK, we all see a reported fall in donations as a result of the tsunami. Macmillan, Cancer Relief, RNLI – the three that have come out and said they have seen an impact. In addition, a number of mailing houses have reported that some charities are cancelling or postponing their own direct mail campaigns. Why is it early days to be conclusive about the impact on other charities? It would not be unusual for some causes to find that they are receiving less money than they might otherwise have expected, and I would not expect giving this year to be substantially more than in past years. It will be very interesting to see the result of Red Nose day – it will be great to see whether it’s keeping its record.
We will get a fuller picture later in the summer when we see the results for voluntary giving for 2004-05. Most importantly, there is undoubtedly a renewed enthusiasm for charitable giving, but such commitment is fragile. We must show the impact of the money. Brendan and his colleges from DEC have a huge responsibility on behalf of the whole sector to communicate what has been achieved. We must accept that charitable giving and transparency are two sides of the same coin. I will not guarantee that giving will rise if we do have transparency on the Tsunami Appeal, but I will say that the risk of it declining if we do not is substantial.

Sir Nicholas Young

Chief Executive, British Red Cross

I. Preamble
As the sweeper up in this debate and discussion, I’ve been given a ragbag of questions to answer, but they’re all really interesting ones and I could talk for hours on all of it, so let me try to do my best to capture the key ideas.

II. Balancing Needs
First of all, I’ve been asked how the Red Cross goes about balancing needs in a situation like this: both balancing needs within the countries affected and balancing the needs of the whole area affected, e.g. the needs of people in Africa and other parts of the world where disasters and very serious issues are [in place?]. That is, indeed, a very difficult thing to do properly; I guess the Red Cross advantage in that there is a Red Cross or Red Crescent organisation in every country in the world. Therefore, at the same time as we are delivering aid, we started to do – such as the volunteers of the Sri Lankan Red Cross, for example, started to do, on Boxing Day, within minutes of the tsunami – at the same time as we are delivering aid, we are already starting to carry out our careful assessments of what the immediate needs are, and then, over more time, what the medium? and longer?term needs are.
It is quite unusual for us – for the Red Cross, certainly – to have the kind of money that has so generously been given by the British public available. Our focuses will be very short?term and, in this case, we all feel fairly satisfied that the immediate needs of the people in those countries affected have already been met – the immediate, short term needs. However, now we are turning to this careful period of review and assessment, when we try to make sure that we are spending your money wisely and well.
I have some difficulties with this, and let me explain why. Last week, I was in Sri Lanka, and I sat in a Buddhist temple, on wooden bench, facing 25 local people who had lost their livelihoods, they had lost their loved ones – they had lost the things they need to live their lives. They were describing those needs to me: one wanted a fishing net, another wanted his boat repaired, a woman wanted a collar?making machine to be restored to her, another woman had just lost her husband and had no skills, and wanted us to help her develop skills so that she could earn her own living – a very complex, detailed discussion we had about the needs of those people.
I then had to explain why I couldn’t meet those needs that day. I wanted to – I wanted, actually, to give them a bundle of money and say, ‘Here you are – spend it. Use it for what you need’, but the demands – the rightful demands – of accountability mean that we just can’t do it like that; we have to conduct the assessment of what the needs are, and then we have to do a very difficult process of juggling priorities, because there is always more to do than you have the money for.

III. First-Time Givers
Then let’s go on to the second question, which is about first?time givers: have we encouraged a large number of first?time givers, like Martyn, to carry on giving. The answer, I think – apart from saying thank you, which is actually incredibly important – the other thing is really Stephen’s point about impact and accountability: we have to show them that whatever they have given, it has made a difference to the lives of people in Indonesia and Sri Lanka. I absolutely agree with you, Stephen: that is a really onerous and important responsibility that we, in the voluntary sector, have.

IV. Talking Back
The third question follows on from that really: that it is about talking back. It is about not just telling you how much we have spent – we have spent already quite a lot; it’s not just about telling you what we have bought with that money – the number of cooking pots we have delivered, the number of tents that we have erected; but it is also about explaining the difference that those cooking pots and those tents have made to the lives of people we are trying to help. It is also, I think, about explaining the complexities of helping in those situations.
I think there is an important issue, which Brendan and I have certainly talked about in the DEC (Disasters Emergency Committee). We have raised a lot of money; we have raised far more money than we ever anticipated. We have raised far more money than any other single appeal has ever raised – I think, anywhere in the world. That means that we have to think very carefully of how to use it, not just in the short term, but in the medium and the long term, in a context that is a very complicated one: you have conflict in western Indonesia, you have conflict in northern Sri Lanka, you have an Indian government saying they don’t want any money – they’ve got all they need, thank you.
You’ve got the complexities of the fishermen who need their boats repaired and the houses that need rebuilding. There are lots and lots of complex issues to resolve and I think it’s right for us, as charities, to acknowledge those complexities and to explain to the public why it’s not just a matter of going out and ‘doshing’ out the money – we need to be sure that the people who really need it are getting it.

V. Excess Money
That, finally, leads on to the fourth question: what happens when more money is given than can be responsibly spent? Well, I think, Bill, to pick up your point about the aid agencies, all the money will be responsibly spent – that, I can absolutely put my hand on my heart and assure all you generous people who have given to us in the audience tonight. However, I think it will be a long time – certainly months, probably years - before we know whether we’ve raised enough or too much or too little. I think, at this moment in time, the jury is out.

VI. Conclusion
The UN has calculated that US$12.5 billion is needed to rebuild and reconstruct the lives and livelihoods in the Indian Ocean, and say that, so far, only US$5.5 billion has been committed, so that suggests quite a big gap. Either way, we are enormously grateful to the British public for what you have done, and so, I can tell you, having been there last week, are the people of Sri Lanka and the other countries around the Indian Ocean.

Panel Discussion

Martyn Lewis
Thank you very much indeed. What I would like to do is to divide our discussion into three, perhaps four, areas. The first is the question of whether other charities suffer when a big cause singles out their attention. Then we could go on to talk about how we turn these first?time givers who donated to the tsunami appeal into long?term charity?givers and tap into that spirit of generosity, and then how we build on the high?tech methods that Lord Bell was talking about; how we make use of Gift Aid as well more widespread than we have seen so far. Before we go on to talk about the extent to which other charities might suffer, I want to pick out something that several of our speakers raised. As Nick said, Stephen talked about the importance of showing the results of charitable giving and, Bill, you talked about the obligation on charities to come up with the stories. Tim, you talked about how TV did show some of the results of reconstruction. I just wonder whether there is a tendency on the part of the media, which they might have broken away from in the case of the tsunami appeal, but a general tendency to show the disasters happening, but not actually to show the reconstruction in the wake of the disasters, because that is a more boring story. Bill, do you have any thoughts about that?

W F Deedes
[Yes, I do. My theory is that the work done afterwards by people like the Red Cross and other aid agencies is absolutely full of the sort of human interest that newspapers like. It is absolutely crucial that, when you’ve raised large sums of money, you must tell those who have given the money what you have done with it and, as you said, what has made a difference: what difference did you make? That’s what we want to know].

Martyn Lewis
Do you think that media abdicates its responsibility on that to a great extent?

W F Deedes
[The media does less than it might?]

Martyn Lewis
Tim, do you believe that?

Lord Bell
I do, but I think, on the other hand, it is incumbent on the charities to come up with good ideas to get people to do it. There is a charity television channel, which should be used more. There are all sorts of newspapers to do with charity. I just think people have got to find more interesting ways of doing it. [I don’t believe it’s true, what Stephen said, that showing all the news footage is the way to do it]. I don’t think the public responds to complicated tables of figures and mission statements; it responds to being shown something very dramatic. I don’t think the media are [sick of saying?] they’re not going to show any more stories; I think it’s another part of the promotion of charities that is not done as well as some industries, which is to get people in creative industries and innovative industries to think of ways of showcasing these things and getting these things across. I think the charity world has embraced people who work in [inaudible] to help them in raising money; they’re not very interested in using them to get across what they’ve achieved.

Stephen Ainger
I absolutely agree with all of that, and I just think it’s important, when we try to get the stories out about what’s been achieved, that it looks like £350 million worth. I totally agree with the view of human interest stories and so on, but it’s somehow got to capture the scale of what we’ve done, because [everyone in this incident], and the biggest success that we’ve got is very aware of how much money we’ve spent, and I want it to be clear and obvious to people just how much has been achieved with that sort of money, and it can’t just be a few trophy hospitals or a couple of human interest stories.

Martyn Lewis
If faced with another change of the stories to cover, and the media are unlucky to do it, do you think some of this money, for example, might be used to lay on media flights and even ship them around the region?

Stephen Ainger
I think, personally, we should start being honest with people about the cost of fundraising and the traditional cost is what – 25?30% per pound? In this particular case, I think it’s been phenomenally efficient in terms of the cost of raising money, and I would have no problem at all with spending some of that on actually communicating what’s been achieved. It’s part and parcel of the responsibility.

Martyn Lewis
Does anybody here have any thoughts about just how charities might make the results of their work more attractive to the media?

Debra, Christian Aid
I wish there were an appetite for more international stories. There was a survey a couple of years ago that looked at how many television hours were given over, on British TV, to international stories, and it’s slumped. It’s extremely hard to get those stories across. Conversely, I think, the press are now calling, looking for the negative stories: they’re looking for where the money is not going. With the British public having done an amazing job, the media have not communicated that and are looking for the downside – where the money isn’t reaching.

David Harrison
I’ve covered places like Afghanistan and lots of other wars, and I’ve had a lot to do with charities, and I’ve seen the good work that they do out there. However, there are two issues here: the first one is getting the statistics and collating information and establishing exactly where the money is going and what it’s for. The second question is how you get that out and the way you get that out is through the media. I disagree slightly with what you guys are saying: I think there’s room for both. I think tables can be boring, but it’s quite important – people need those statistics. How much money is being spent on this? We’ve all given so much money – where is it going? We need a detailed breakdown of that, and I think we owe that to the public. The second point is to make it digestible and to make it readable and interesting to people and you do that through stories about people. Again, I disagree that the media is not looking for negative stories. I think that’s absolute rubbish. The media is looking for stories that people want to read. Unfortunately, it isn’t the way of things that the tsunami disaster is far more interesting than rebuilding houses – that’s just the way of life. If you have two stories to tell to friends, you would tell the story about the tsunami first before you talk about rebuilding houses. That’s human nature. I think that’s an issue for the media; we buy newspapers and we see TV programmes. There’s a lot to be debated about that, but I think we’re dealing with fundamental human nature and how the media manages it. I think there is room for lots of human interest stories. I think charities do have a role here, because for charities it is quite easy to talk about the initial stages of the disaster and to get lots of coverage; the hard work for charities and the media is how you cover what’s happening afterwards. That requires lots of work and lots of serious thought about what the public want to read.

Martyn Lewis
Just very quickly on that, Brendan: are we doing enough to tell people about where their money is going and how it’s been spent?

Brendan Gormley
I think probably not, but I think we shouldn’t whinge about how difficult it is. I think we need to set our challenge and meet it. What we have done is contract the celebrities that front the appeal, ask them to go – that’s the story people want: to send the celebrity in front of the appeal out to go and see. We’ve got plans to get donors to go out and see and film it. You have to find stories that capture the imagination, but it is very difficult to sell those stories to the editors. We’re not good in a mass market; we’re rather worthy and slightly boring in the stuff we put out. Trying to engage with GMTV and Breakfast and the mass market, which we’ve got to do, because this is a mass appeal, is at the edges of both what we’re good at and actually feel comfortable with. I think we do feel uncomfortable just promoting the fact that celebrities are about the only hook I can bank quickly with the editors and the producers.

Lord Bell
We shouldn’t be ashamed of this; virtually everybody uses celebrities all the time to do everything.

Brendan Gormley
That’s what we do, but I think, in the sector, we feel uncomfortable.

Martyn Lewis
Is that a sad reflection on the state of journalism?

Lord Bell
[inaudible]

Caroline Diehl, Media Trust
As a charity sector, we’ve got work harder at getting the management of the media and using the management of the media, and actually spending more money and time to do it. I’m very nervous about what Stephen is saying. I think he’s right about how much money is spent on fundraising; I’m very nervous that, when the public does start to realise how much is spent on fundraising, the shit will hit the fan, and I think we’ve got to start looking at actually compensating by spending more time and effort, energy and creativity on telling the good news stories. It works in soaps and in all sorts of public?facing media and I think Brendan’s instinct is right: get the celebrities out there, get the ordinary people out there to give them £30 and get them to be seen to meet people. Young people across this country have started making contact internationally through schools, through the web, and I think television will actually follow what’s happening in the new media. I’m glad that Tim mentioned the Community Channel, which raised £1.2 million just through ‘red button’ donations – the biggest amount raised through the red button. We are awaiting a huge response from the stories that we’re telling about the resulting tsunami, and that’s a tiny channel that needs more investment. If we can do it, you can do it to.

Martyn Lewis
Before you hand the microphone back, you talked about the public might be a little appalled if they find out that 25% is going to costs, yet there was a chief of the Charity Commission about 10 years ago, who actually went on record to say that, as far as he was concerned, unless a charity was spending 15?20% on costs, with very great exceptions, he would not wish himself personally to give to that charity, because you do need to make sure that the rest of the money is spent efficiently, and that requires that kind of percentage sometimes.

Stephen Ainger
The 25% is the cost of fundraising, not the cost of doing the work – not the cost of actually implementing the programme. We are in control of the agenda. We have the ability to lead this agenda and the donors are getting increasingly sophisticated and, certainly, the donors we have dealt with really want to know the impact. I certainly agree that we need to put a combination together with the figures, with some celebrities, and some [quality time?] in making this impact clear. If we want to wait, then, yes – some of the media will pick up stories that we spend 25?30% on raising money and is that sensible, but we’re in control.

Nick Paton[?]
Isn’t this already being done effectively by Comic Relief? The BBC report back constantly about the money through celebrities, and I think that’s one of the reasons we’re a success.

Participant
I’m surprised that no one has raised the ethical issue: the spotlight of the media on an individual who has lost virtually everything and who is just beginning to rebuild their lives can be incredibly damaging. It worries me very much that the public may demand far more in terms of human interest stories than is either appropriate for us to seek, or appropriate for us to respond to their progress.

Martyn Lewis
In other words, the appetite will grow for more and more intrusive coverage?

Participant
Yes, and I don’t think that that’s appropriate at all. I think it’s absolutely right that we should have reports of how much money has been spent in what countries, and for what sorts of things, and what the development plans are, but actually, I think, the idea of our actually demanding to physically see exactly where the money has gone, and in whose homes it’s being used, I think we trust charities to do that part of it.

Martyn Lewis
I think that’s a very, very interesting point.

Participant
I’m a private individual – a member of the public – and I just wanted to make two points: one, I love to have feedback. When I have donated to charities, if they have actually written to me and said, ‘your money has been used for x, y and z’, it’s certainly made me want to give more than the charities who haven’t acknowledged it. I think reporting is important and I don’t necessarily think it needs to be on television. I’d like to see an ad in the newspaper – a page saying ‘Tsunami Appeal, blah blah blah’, like a report. I think it doesn’t always have to be something so ‘razzmatazz’, and I think it could be something quite basic. I feel there hasn’t been enough coverage – I have no idea what’s going on with the tsunami. If you’re not very sophisticated and don’t read the broadsheets, there’s not a lot of information. The other thing is I do think the charities should be more honest with the public. Today, I came with a taxi driver – Joe Bloggs – and he said to me, ‘Where are you going?’ and I told him, and he said, ‘Oh, those big charities – the West End – they’ve got all those big offices – they’re all corrupt – I don’t think any of the money goes to where it’s supposed to be’, so I agree with Stephen that you should come clean and you should tell people, and I don’t think the public will be put off, because I think they’re going to trust you. At the moment, they don’t trust what you’re doing with the money.

Sir Nicholas Young
I totally agree with you; I think that, for many years or decades, charities have been afraid to be completely open with the public and the media about the cost of running what are substantial organisations which are spending the hard?earned money of the public. I think we’ve seen plenty of examples where advantage has been taken of that information and the charity has suffered as a result. Many charities have, very irresponsibly, sought to minimise the descriptions of what it costs to run the organisation and what it costs to raise the money, and I feel that it’s time for a grown?up debate and discussion about this, and for the charities to be quite grown up and open about their costs and about the lengths we go to, to keep those costs down. It’s also time, I think, for the public to take part in that grown?up debate, and the media too. I’m a director of GuideStar, which is setting up a website that, for the first time, will put full information and accounts about what charities are doing and how they are spending the public’s money, on the web, easily accessible to absolutely everybody who has access to the web.

Martyn Lewis
Doesn’t the Charity Commission do that?

Sir Nicholas Young
No, it’s actually quite difficult to get hold of the kind of information you want. What we’re saying at GuideStar is that this ought to be out in the public domain and allow people to make comparisons and, where they require further information. The fear is that, unfortunately, the GuideStar website will be used to create league tables, which will not necessarily give an accurate comparison between organisations that are very different; they raise money in different ways and the costs of raising money in different ways are different. You’re not necessarily comparing apples with apples.

Martyn Lewis
Somebody once said to me that there was a charity which spent 99% of its money on administration. They said, ‘Would you give to a charity that spent 99%’, and I said, ‘Of course I wouldn’t’. Then they said, ‘What if I told you the charity was The Samaritans, with all of their phone calls? What would you say?’ Obviously, you can’t challenge that.

Sir Nicholas Young
The very good point that Caroline made is also right: it costs money. I would love to send an information delegate out with the relief flights, armed with a camera, with the press on board, but that all costs money, and that’s money out of the appeal.

Martyn Lewis
Let’s move on to a point we’ve heard. I think there’s no doubt that some charities have suffered because of the tsunami. Are there any charities here tonight who would like to give us chapter and verse of how they have lost out to the Tsunami Appeal? I know there are several here; are any prepared to tell us about this?

Sandra Osborne, Marie Curie Cancer Care
I’m saying the opposite, in fact: our charity had good results in January and February. We obviously braced ourselves for a big impact that might be there. Unlike some charities, we haven’t yet seen the effect. We have in small pockets of particular income streams, but that’s been offset by other activities. I think the previous point about the cost of fundraising is actually quite important here, because I think our stability has probably come from the fact that we have diverse income streams and that some of those are more expensive to deliver than others. However, because we have that wide base of income and the stability that that gives us, then we have been able to cope with the effects on some particular brands getting poor over a short period of time. The few areas where we have seen an effect in January will be offset by some other activities.

Participant
There was an unexpected benefit for our organisation, which works with people with learning disabilities. What the tsunami did was actually unite local communities and, suddenly, people who had been very marginalized were able to fundraise on an equal footing with everybody else in their local community. It was fun for them to bake cakes or wash cars, or whatever it was to raise money, and actually, probably, the single most important thing that has brought them into their local communities, and meant that they have been respected citizens since then.

Martyn Lewis
An interesting point about going in the other direction. Does anybody here have any ideas about how we might fill the shortfall that has been created for those charities that have suffered? Does anybody have any thoughts on how we could it? Should there be some kind of organisation set up to try to redress the balance in some way? How do you tell people to think more about the small charities that, unquestionably, have suffered?

Fiona Rawes, Heart of the City
My question is whether Comic Relief is addressing this head on tomorrow night. I wonder whether anybody knows if that’s happening.

Martyn Lewis
If there is someone here from Comic Relief, maybe we can get that question directly answered.

Participant
I haven’t seen the script, so I don’t know exactly, but no – not particularly. We’re making passing reference, but we’re concentrating on the issues that we are interested in, both in Africa and the UK.

Martyn Lewis
Do you think – and there has been a suggestion – that terrific though events like Comic Relief and Children in Need and the Tsunami Appeal are in raising awareness and raising money, they don’t do very much to create a culture of regular giving throughout the year. People give once, think they’ve done it and that’s it – ‘washing my hands for the year’. Do you think that there is anything that those great organisations like Comic Relief could do to cultivate a much greater spirit of giving in this population on a regular basis?

Participant
It’s a very difficult one. Red Nose Day is every other year, so it’s not even an annual even but a biannual event. We’ve always said that we don’t want to be directly in competition with other charities which have a more traditional form of fundraising. I think that there are quite complicated issues, quite apart from the fact of whether the BBC or any other broadcasting platform would allow seven hours of live television more than once or twice a year.

Lord Bell
The truth is that there are spikes in giving when you have a big event. The problem with the tsunami is [create another great disaster] whereas, on the other hand, the point about Comic Relief is that that creates a massive cycle of giving that is not predicated on a disaster. They are slightly different issues.

Brendan Gormley
I think the challenge for Comic Relief and the BBC is to bring in new donors. The challenge for the charities is then to build on those relationships and create long?term relationships, not as the BBC or Comic Relief, but to let that filter down, so that we have a need and, I think, historically, we bring in 50% of new donors when we have an appeal. For this one, we will bring in even more new donors, but what we want to do is to help them create a long?term relationship with our membership and so with Comic Relief. It has a magical way of engaging with the British public, but the challenge is for those that benefit from Comic Relief to sustain those relationships. I think it’s the charities that forget and rely on it too much. We had this when the Lottery was invented; we all said, ‘Oh dear, it’s going to hurt the charities’ – it hurt the ones that had got complacent. Because we don’t have mergers and acquisitions in our sector, actually you need a good shaking?up every now and again. I’m quite bullish about the separation of responsibilities and where each of us has a niche that, together, we build a giving and committed public.

Martyn Lewis
Those extra people that you bring on to help in a disaster, do you do anything to say, ‘You have a disaster, but there are other charities that regularly need [inaudible]’? Will you help them as well, or are you saying, ‘Here is a niche; you’ve got into this niche and we just want to keep you there’?

Brendan Gormley
I feel more empowered to go to the board and say let’s – normally, we’d spend no more than 2% on the cost of the appeal, and so we probably overly constrain ourselves, but one of the things we’re going to look at, because we’ve got this fantastic new community, that we should be going back to them after a few months – exactly the sort of things we’ve heard – and saying, ‘Look – do you want to know more about our members? Tick the box here if you want to know more about the generic decisions’. I think there are ways of drawing in and making relationships within the community that is the BBC, but it is expensive. However, I’m going to go and do it, because I’m hearing that that’s the sort of thing that we have got to do in order to bank the goodwill that is out there.

Stephen Ainger
I didn’t hear that; I didn’t hear that you should go around and encourage your donors to get additional members. What I heard was that we need to use these big appeals and events to get people to give generally across the board, and that’s what I would certainly encourage you to do. Just to get things into perspective, total individual giving in this country is flat in real terms over the last 12 years, and is £7.4 billion per year. Just to put that £300 million in comparison, £7.4 billion isn’t very much, and what we’ve got to do is to get that £7.4 billion up and get the higher?rate taxpayers feeling more part of the community, participating in the community, and giving generally.

Martyn Lewis
Does anybody have any ideas on how we might tap into this great spike in giving, to encourage the giving spirit right throughout the idea?

Participant
I just wanted to add two more points: one is volunteering. Tomorrow, we will probably have 100,000 hours of volunteer time on the telephones alone, and that’s without anybody out on the streets doing fundraising – that’s just on the telephones.

Martyn Lewis
So you’re saying that giving up time is just as important.

Participant
Second, just as another point, in terms of new technologies and the new media, text?voting is an enormously powerful fundraiser. Looking at Celebrity Fame Academy, which is up to £850,000 so far, and will probably get nearer £1 million by Friday night; Chris Moyles on the Radio 1 bus – that’s going to reach £100,000 – and these are young people, probably first?time donors.

Martyn Lewis
Do you think that that’s something that could be used throughout the year? If it is a success, is it something that could and should be used throughout the year by many more charities?

Participant
I think that’s the other charities – we’re not there, week in week out. We’re doing a final event, but I think it’s a medium that is there and available for others to use.

Participant
I work for an accountancy firm. We do a lot of work for charities, but we also encourage people within the firm to do volunteering. With company intranets and email systems, I have a wonderful email attachment from the Red Cross telling me how they’d spent their money on the tsunami. I think it’s a cheap and easy way for charities to link up with firms. A lot of companies do things, but perhaps if others had been encouraged to give at source, it could be done tax?efficiently. I think more work should be done in that area, because people are earning money and they’re obviously going to want to spend it as well.

Martyn Lewis
Are you actively working to create a better sense of feedback?

Sir Nicholas Young
Yes – it’s customer focus. Obviously, we want to build a relationship with our donors. We want them, not only to continue to support us financially, but we want them to be advocates for us amongst their family and friends, to talk about the Red Cross and the link they are building with us, and we also wanted to look at the at the volunteering idea too. We had something like 4,000 calls in the first week or two after the tsunami from people who wanted to do something – not just give money. We had deep?sea divers, we had people who wanted to drive down with loads of blankets and tents and things, we had people who wanted to come and help us pack planes – including two young princes.

Martyn Lewis
Some of that will be inappropriate, because [inaudible], so how do you then say to somebody with great enthusiasm and says ‘I want to help and I want to give my time’, ‘I’m terribly sorry, we won’t be ready for another six months’?

Sir Nicholas Young
We had to put a team of four on the phones just to answer those queries and make sure that people who were so kindly offering time as well as money – to make sure we were having a conversation with them and that what we were saying to them was, ‘Look, we can’t use you now, but leave us your name, address and phone number, and we’ll get back to you and talk to you in due course about how we can build that relationship with you’. We are now going through that process. We are contacting those people and hoping to turn them into Red Cross fans.

Martyn Lewis
On the new technology means of giving, are you doing a lot on that, or do you have a lot of work left to really get your feet under the table on that one?

Sir Nicholas Young
We haven’t got our feet under the table properly in terms of texting, but certainly in terms of giving on the net, we are just stunned by the level of giving on the net. We had the Bam earthquake this time last year, and we raised something like £2 million, and a tiny proportion – 1% - came over the net. This time, where we raised £15 million ourselves, plus the DEC money, over a third of that came on the net. That’s very exciting. It means that people are really using that.

Nick Green[?], Filmmaker
You’ve been talking about using technology to raise money; I think you should be using technology to say thank you, and why not be a company like Google? Millions of people go every day. [inaudible new technology]. A quick thank you – ‘you’ve done this, you’ve done that’; text people back, saying ‘thank you for your money; this buys a thousand tents’. You don’t have to be completely accurate, but then you have that two-way communication and you start engaging people in a conversation. I think there are many ways you can use technology to say thank you, to keep people in the picture, and to bring stories to life.

Martyn Lewis
Bill, can you see the Daily Telegraph [inaudible] enable charities to say thank you?

W F Deedes
We do something over Christmas, and we also give some account of how the money’s been spent. [inaudible].

Martyn Lewis
The media, in general, say ‘we’ve covered the story; we may have had some difficulty reporting what was being done in the way of reconstruction after the disaster, but we will allow the charities [inaudible].

W F Deedes
If everybody was as good as the Red Cross at telling you the story on the ground, we wouldn’t have a problem. I’ve worked with the Red Cross in various parts of the world. After the genocide in Rwanda, they were very good: they took me to see the orphans, people who had given up their careers; they took me to see towns being put together again. They always seem to know where the main interest lies.

Martyn Lewis
If everyone was like that, there wouldn’t be any need for –

W F Deedes
They would arouse the public interest.

Brendan Gormley
Just a comment on, clearly, how big the challenge is. This time, for the first time, we took – normally we’d rely on less space – we actually took quarter?page ads in every single national and most regional newspapers to say thank you: to say what’s been raised and to say that we would be reporting back regularly. We did TV ads, and we got the BBC, for the first time, to run second appeal as a thank you. We are trying, but it clearly isn’t enough. The models are out there; it’s the commitment and the will to keep negotiating that space and repeating those messages that is necessary. We’ve shifted gear from historically saying, ‘Well, we’ll get a space for three and sixpence’; this time, we’ve said ‘No, this is so big we’re going to buy it.’

Participant
I’ve been on the Christmas Charity at the Telegraph. The one thing we do – obviously we say thank you, but we get 2,500 calls in a day and we ask for their addresses for their credit card, and they all say, ‘Please don’t use any money in writing to us, either to say thank you’ or whatever – they really don’t want that, so I do think you have to be slightly cautious about that. I think it’s amazing that 86% of 18-24 year?olds made donations, which – if true – is the most stunning figure ever. I think the number of people that vote in that age group is 20?30%.

Martyn Lewis
Are you saying that politicians should turn themselves into charities?

Participant
I’m saying that this is an open door. That figure of 86% is just extraordinary.

Martyn Lewis
It’s an amazing figure.

Stephen Ainger
One of the comments that we got back from young people was that it seemed to have more impact than voting.

Martyn Lewis
Let me move on to our final point today, which is how we build on high-tech methods like text?messaging, and how we make the use of Gift Aid more widespread. Are there any ideas out there that any of you would like to throw into the pot?

Participant
I think that the sector is not robust enough about the problems of the Gift Aid scheme. I think we’ve fallen into the trap of thanking government for their generosity in implementing such a scheme and we allow Treasury officials and ministers to tell us that some of the problems in the scheme are our fault in not publicising the scheme, instead of saying, as Lord Bell has done, that there should be no taxation on charitable giving at all. The government should be looking at how they can ensure that no tax is levied on charitable giving. Under the groundbreaking methods of giving, the last point is made is that 50% of larger gifts over £25 were made tax?efficiently, which means, of course, that 50% were not, and that means a significant amount of money went to the Treasury that should have gone to disaster relief. I think that is an issue and we should be a little more robust and say that’s a problem for government, not for us.

Martyn Lewis
It’s a very good point and definitely one to expand on. Is there an issue there, in that, if you’re going to be open-ended, Treasury wouldn’t know what the budget was each year? In fact, if they did do it, how much could it cost and what’s the potential?

Stephen Ainger
When the tax laws were changed in 2000, and corporates were given more tax benefits, corporate giving, overnight, dropped by 20%. Secondly, I personally think that we need to think very carefully about changing tax relief into a government grant. At the moment, because it is linked to giving, it is linked to being part of the community and it’s very much a part of it. If you turn it into a government grant every year, we need to be very careful.

Lord Bell
Why on earth, if I were to give £50,000 to the Red Cross, do I have to give a percentage of that to the government? Why? What’s the reason? I understand why you pay income tax, but I cannot understand why, if you make a donation, some of that money goes to government. Why? That’s something we should be curtailing and eventually we should stop doing it.

Martyn Lewis
Do you think the charitable sector has been maybe a little reticent on this? At the end of the day, a lot of people in the charitable sector don’t want to offend government because, at some point, they may be applying to one government department or another for some money for their organisation?

Lord Bell
[Inaudible] get a few changes, we’ve got Gift Aid. I just think that the world of givers to charities should say that they do not wish to give any of this to government.

Martyn Lewis
How many of you here would like to see a really strong campaign by the charitable sector to actually abolish all tax for charities? How many of you would like to see that happen? How many of you realistically think that you would win – that you would succeed?

W F Deedes
[If you can get regular subscribers, they’re worth a lot more than [inaudible], in my experience. A mandatory concession for those who subscribe regularly [inaudible].

Martyn Lewis
That actually knocks on the head two of the issues we’ve been talking about this evening in one fell swoop: how to make people more regular donors and how to address the tax issue. Come on – are we going to get a campaign out of this? If so, are you going to win it?

Brendan Gormley
We have the advantage that the government, at the moment, in one sense, is on the back foot, because the British public has been much more generous than the government has with our taxpayers’ money. The difficulty is that, if it’s the professionals, it’s so appealing for our little cause, so it needs a more broader?based campaign, but there are some very short and easy wins. It is on our list and we’re going back to the hearing with Nick very soon, and we will continue to make the simple case that, of the 1.7 million people who donated on the phones, those that said they would like to make this tax efficient, we have to write to, because a phone call is not audited.

Sir Nicholas Young
The bureaucracy around this is, in my view, totally unnecessary. I am on a joint campaign with the government to promote charitable giving, and particularly to promote Gift Aid, and I think we have been relatively successful in persuading more charities to promote tax?efficient giving to their donors. However, it is down to the charities to do it and it’s then down to the donors to fill in the form. It’s just clunky; it ought to be much easier.

Martyn Lewis
It should be down to the government to make it better, but you’re saying to me that the case is being made and it has been made for Peter?

Sir Nicholas Young
Yes, but I think you have a case to be made [inaudible]. I was asked to make a speech and I said to the Chancellor, who was there, that ‘I wanted it to be really painful to you. I would only be satisfied with our Gift Aid campaign if you, Chancellor, are really smarting and hurting, and he smirked’. He smirked then, and I think he smirked at the end of the campaign, because we didn’t really succeed in making the pips squeak.

Kate Kirkland, Consultant, Kate Kirkland Consultants Ltd
I think, actually, we’re bashing the government a bit too much on this compared to the donors. The government have given us Gift Aid. The tax has already been paid: I pay my income tax when I earn it. When I choose to make my gift to the charity, the government will pay back to the charity the tax I’ve already paid on it. I agree that it needs to be made much more simple and much less costly for charities to administer the scheme, but I think we could do much more as a sector to publicise to the general public just how easy it is to give by Gift Aid. I mean, when I made my tsunami donation, I did it on the net. I filled in my details and there was a little box which said, ‘click the button here if you want to give it by Gift Aid’. It couldn’t have been easier.

Martyn Lewis
50% of people actually did nothing.

Kate Kirkland
Yes, but why is that? I find it particularly worrying about the high?earning donors who are probably more likely to be the higher rate taxpayers, where there can be a personal advantage for them. Let’s face it: they can personally get back the difference between basic rate of tax and the higher rate of tax, or they can choose to also give that to the charity. Why is it that this supposedly well-educated part of the public doesn’t understand how easy it is to give tax effectively, and shouldn’t we be doing more as a sector to educate them?

Stephen Ainger
I think we underestimate all the progress that’s been made since this was introduced in 2000. I mean, Christian Aid [inaudible] a few months ago, and over the last four years people had introduced systems to get rid of tax?effectively [inaudible] all tax?efficient. I think that now, of that £7.5 billion, 33% is tax?efficient. The tax that the Chancellor had to pay is a billion. When I spoke to the Chancellor and said ‘How can you change it so much?’ I got the same smile, but he is absolutely committed to this and I think you should give him credit for it.

Participant
It’s all fine to talk about Gift Aid and increasing that – that’s all [in heart?]. But, what we really need is to give a very strong signal: the public doesn’t like bureaucracy; that’s absolutely right. If the charities could get together and if we said [there ought to be an adjusted position to put a campaign together?], get the public behind a campaign to abolish tax on charitable giving. We can really signal that if you give £50, the charity gets £50. I think you would find you can tap into a huge wave of public sympathy and generosity and I think you’d be amazed by the results.

Laura Webb, Head of Membership, Institute of Fundraising
Just an observation on the Gift Aid matter. I don’t have too much detail on it at the moment, but just to let you know that our policy unit is at the moment in talks with the Treasury about how we actually, sector-wide, promotion of the gift aid scheme to the public so they should have more information about how that works.

Martyn Lewis
So that addresses the whole Gift Aid scheme.

Participant
Thank you, Martyn. I’m very interested in the idea that we’ve promoted of a campaign to ensure all donations are resulting in [inaudible] by the government. I think the basis of any such campaign could actually be to link, in a way, to link it to the value?added tax that charities already pay, which are an enormous burden on charities and we look at the basis that they pay so much tax on VAT, what is the logic behind the current tax structure, whereby you tick a box and your donation is increased by 10% or 20%. By [inaudible] that box, you get paid nothing. It just, actually, is logically indefensible and it all arises from the basic provisional basis on which the covenants were actually…resulted in tax benefits, but there’s no logic in the tax system, and I think the suggestion that there’s room there for a campaign is exactly right. Just moving on from that, I hesitate to disagree with Stephen about this 25?30% money spent on raising money. Certainly, in most of the charities that I have been involved with the figure is a lot less and I think there are dangers in looking at averages and I think, as you pointed out in the example of The Samaritans, it might represent all the money that was spent. I’d be very cautious about there being a statement that 25-30% of the money raised by charities is actually spent on raising that money

Martyn Lewis
Stephen, do you want to take a look at that again, look at that figure?

Stephen Ainger
We published the data [inaudible].

Sir Nicholas Young
The issue is, if you didn’t spend the money you wouldn’t get any money in the first place, through our shops, for example; they raise I suppose about £20 million a year. It costs us £16 million to raise shop rents and salaries for the managers and all the rest of it. But, if we didn’t spend that money we wouldn’t have that [finance in that net?] that makes all the difference to our world.

Martyn Lewis
I think there’s some amazement that on the launch we’re going to spend £3 million pounds on a direct mail shot, but it actually raised £11 million. So at the end of the day, there’s a real net benefit to the charity that does that.

Richard Harries, Volunteering and Charitable Giving Unit
Can I just ask the panel if they have any ideas for other ways the government can promote charitable giving?

Brendan Gormley
In the sense that we channel private giving and for the challenge[?] of our members to get with government on government’s plan [inaudible] is not an area I feel –

Martyn Lewis
Right, let’s bounce some very quick ideas around about how we see things.

Participant
I think the premise is wrong and the less the Government has to do with it, the better, and referring to the disillusion many people feel about misused funds, picking up the UN, one thinks people aren’t standing up and being counted when you can’t tell how they’re using the money and how they’re spending it. The best way forward for charitable work is for charities to do it. Those, by the way, have become like religious foundations. If they’re really needed, then people will be truly committed. You can’t be complacent about raising money and then not spending it well, so that the charities that are needed will be there and doing well with the public. The less that any political party has to do with it, the better.

Participant
Just a very quick point on the legacy that you could get from a DEC appeal and the fact that certain people didn’t tick that gift aid box, I think it would be really useful to name and shame the public on it and do a campaign to say this much money was not raised because the box wasn’t ticked and use that to actually explain what was the effect.

Participant
Do you know that those 50% pay tax? I mean, a lot of them for 18-24 year olds, they probably didn’t; certainly a lot of the older people didn’t pay tax, either.

Nigel Edward-Few, Director, BibleLands
Our giving is entirely continuous appeals. I wanted to pick up on the point that was made earlier. The premise of this evening is, ‘What was the effect of the tsunami on charitable giving? Will it affect us, and so on?’ I think we should not keep looking at ourselves in a competitive light with each other – there is room for all of us if we do it in a proper way, are properly accountable, and if we have something that is genuinely, properly worthy of support. It’s about complementarity. There will always be the disaster appeals to be made and the big organisations, but there is also room for the smaller as well. We should not be mutually exclusive or seen to be in competition with each other.

Rosemary James, Noor Jehan Centre
I’m the founder of a multicultural arts centre in inner London. We work with volunteers and we receive donations, but the conversation here has largely been about donors. I don’t like paying VAT when we do things that are a benefit to our community. It’s rather odd that if I pay a lot of money and get a printer to print something for me promoting the charity, I don’t have to pay VAT; but if I go and buy a printer and some ink, I have to pay VAT on everything. The end result is the same: it is publicity for the charity. We could be greatly benefited by not having to pay VAT for charity purchases, for items or goods for the work that we do.

Fiona Dawe, Youthnet
Youthnet is an online charity for young people. I wanted to say two things. One was in connection to other things that might encourage [exempted income?] donation. One of the things that might be useful to think about is how we can also make our own money in terms of social enterprises and other things, in the way that charity shops traditionally have done, through other sorts of mechanisms, particularly as this provides a source of unrestricted cash which we can then choose to spend on any issue. That might be interesting, particularly for some kinds of charities. I want to go back to volunteering: you said [inaudible] and the National Volunteering Database. You also had a massive response to the tsunami on the website, where people were trying to find out how they could give their time and energy and effort. This is also the Year of the Volunteer. One of the legacies of the Year of the Volunteer is the idea that we’d like to be able to build a piece of infrastructure that would support organisations who would need another mechanism to gather the interest of people who might have given money but also want to help, in the way Sir Nicholas was saying, and we could also put in technological things such as Customer Relations Marketing (CRM) systems, where you can actually communicate with people in very intuitive and user-friendly ways to keep them onside and onboard. I’m sure there’s a very good link between people who give money and people who give their time. That was just a thought for some of the things that might have an impact.

Nicholas Hellen, Social Affairs Editor, Sunday Times
It has been suggested that since there’s no loss to somebody from getting the tax called back, you have to assume everybody would want their tax called back. More constructively, we need to try to see how to make it work. The issue is how to assess who is a taxpayer, and we can’t. We know [inaudible] pension credits, people find it impossible to claim what is owed to them. Rather than naming and shaming donors who don’t sign Gift Aid boxes, the more fruitful approach, surely, is to find a way of identifying who are the taxpayers so you don’t have to have every individual ticking and opting in. As I said, even when there’s money in it for people, they don’t do it. I think there’s a great deal of over-optimism there about how the revenue works. Maybe nobody else has ever had trouble with revenue before. Most people don’t want to draw any attention at all. I think a centralized way of deciding and making a calculation of how much extra money you’ve accrued, once you’ve accepted the principle, the Treasury are prepared to recoup the tax, they would just have a negotiation like anybody else. You don’t have to do it by individual.

Martyn Lewis
There are some wonderful ideas. Can I just ask our panel, finally, for two sentences from each of you about one single idea that came out of tonight that you would like to put forward, that you think would make a real difference and could be effectively achieved fairly quickly in increasing the number of people who regularly give to charity? Who would like to go first?

Sir Nicholas Young
I feel the need for more boasting and bragging about charitable giving. People are far too shy about how much we give to charity, and everybody in this room gives lots and lots. I think they should have badges of every kind to boast about.

W F Deedes
[Inaudible] I do believe that tax incentives at every level would make an enormous difference. In the United States, they do. That’s the governmental role.

Martyn Lewis
Just a couple of figures you haven’t had in front of you about the difference with the United States. In the UK we give to charities spontaneously. In the United States, there is a culture of planned giving. 40% of voluntary income comes from planned giving. 2% of the UK’s employees give to charity through their payroll; 35% in the United States. 1% of UK employers offer a scheme, compared to 20% of employers in the United States. I could go on, but there are lots of differences.

Brendan Gormley
What I have taken from this is that clearly the challenge is to demonstrate that we have had an impact, that the money has achieved something. This appeal and the scale of it, and the ingenuity and the resources in this region, should mean that we will leave these communities better off to face future shocks. It should not need to be what it often is, that all we can show is that ‘we have slowed this down a bit’ or we have left people in grinding poverty; there is a real success story if we can translate this sort of cash into long-term change – and communicate that.

Stephen Ainger
I would say three things. One, for charities to tell what we do with the £33 million that we get, 1% of the GDP. We have a great story to tell and we need to tell it, something the Americans are extremely good at. Secondly, I think the government should pass the Charities Bill and get the Charity Commission up to give the recommendations and rigour we need to be able to show that the money is spent wisely. Lastly, I would say social investment funds, and to really encourage the social investor with a new way of attracting donation.

Martyn Lewis
Ladies and gentlemen, in a moment I am going to announce very quickly one sentence about the each of the Beacon Prizes for this year. [Inaudible.] Before I do that, would you give a warm round of applause to our panel? Now, a lightning spin through the Beacon Prizes for 2004. The Beacon Prize for Leadership goes to Sir Bob Geldof, for his leadership role in alleviating poverty, famine, and genocide, especially in the Third World, and for his advocacy of the rights of fathers. The Beacon Prize for Community Builder goes to Dr Mohammad Amran, for his contribution to community work, especially with young people and with regard to racial equality. The Beacon Prize for New Initiatives, to Rosalind Portman, for her contribution to family support, bridging the gap between school, home, and the community. The Beacon Prize for Creative Giving goes to Professor Peter Guthrie for his contribution to disaster relief, providing capital support and humanitarian programmes for [inaudible]. The Beacon Prize for Creative Giving also goes to Bruce Crowther for his contribution to developing and generating awareness of the Fair Trade movement. The Beacon Prize for Risk Taking goes to Brigadier Peter Stewart-Richardson, for his contribution in response to the needs of women and children in Afghanistan. The Beacon Prize for Young Philanthropist goes to Jake Bonsall for his contribution to his local community, especially his work with other young people. The judges’ special prizes: for the Most Generous Celebrity, to Jamie Oliver for his contribution to disadvantaged young people, offering training and practical experience in the catering industry. For the Most Generous Business Leader, to John Studzinsky, for his contribution to the arts and active support for the homeless. To the Most Generous Young Person, Francesca D’Arcy for her contribution in volunteering and fundraising for charities. The Judges’ Special Prize for Lifetime Achievement to Major Richard Carr-Gomm, for his outstanding contribution to caring for the lonely [inaudible]. The Judges’ Special Prize – three of them – go to Sigrid Rausing for her contribution to human and women’s rights and the environment; to Dr Frederick Mulder for his contribution to highly innovative approaches in the field of philanthropy; and to Ann Cotton for her contribution to girls’ education in rural Africa. The national and regional prizes, our last four prizes: the Beacon Prize for Scotland goes to Dr Mora Scott for her contribution to the welfare of children in Scotland; in Wales it goes to Sir David Rowe-Beddoe for his contribution to the economic and social development of Wales; in England, to Dennis Humble for his contribution to people with learning disabilities and the environment; and in Northern Ireland, to Niall Fitzduff for his contribution to rural community development in Northern Ireland. What a splendid spread of charities that are represented. Please give them all a round of applause. Finally, as for all the ideas we’ve had tonight that are going to be thrown at the government, I hope the government represented here will take some messages with them. You’ve got campaigns [inaudible] to try to achieve some changes that will be genuinely beneficial to charities. I was reminded of the comment that Sir Winston Churchill made when he was asked what he thought of Americans. He paused for a moment and he said, ‘Americans always make the right decision, having previously exhausted every other possibility.’ So there is a chance for governments – after the vote tonight, whichever government it is – to actually get it right the first time around. Thank you all very much for coming.

This Commercial Verbatim Transcript was produced by Ubiqus Reporting (+44 (0) 20 7749 9100)