Brexit And Charities

In the second of this week's post-Brexit pieces, we look at how UK charities are faced with an even more uncertain future.

The last couple of years have been, shall we say, complicated for the Third Sector. Deep drops in donations, a difficult relationship with government and a couple of high-profile scandals have left charities exposed and struggling. In Brexitland, things are unlikely to improve.

Financially, the Sector is likely to take a big hit. The steep fall in both UK markets and the value of the pound have a couple of harsh effects. Firstly, many charities that do work abroad buy a lot of foreign currency to be able to purchase supplies and pay support staff on the ground. That has suddenly become more expensive.

Meanwhile, grant funding from charitable foundations to worthy causes will also drop off. The tanking UK market means that the investment assets that these foundations rely on to do business are suddenly worth a lot less than they were this time last week. £5billion less, in fact. The political uncertainty in the country at the moment is not one in which the markets feel comfortable doing business. If things continue as they are, charities that depend on grants over the next financial year could find themselves looking at a lot of red lines in the account book.

And this is before we mention the uncomfortable question of funding from the EU itself. A potential £200million shortfall from EU programs is likely to vanish, with no enthusiasm from the UK government to replace it. When the minister in charge of the sector, Rob Wilson, calls grant funding for charities "unsustainable", you know you're in trouble.

That relationship between charities and government is uncertain to improve in this new environment. David Cameron's Big Society seems a long time ago now, and there's likely to be a hardening in attitude from a more right-wing administration (which seems a given, given the front-runner for new Prime Minister). Charities, as ever expected to do more with less and forced to pick up the shortfall from collapsing and underfunded public services, will find themselves caught between a rockier rock and a harder place.

The more difficult question to quantify (one which David Ainsworth teases out in this piece for Civil Society) is how charities face a public that suddenly seem to view refugees, the disabled and the underprivileged with suspicion or downright dislike. The Third Sector has always been one that works on an inclusive view of the world. We are all brothers and sisters, and we have a responsibility to help those who cannot help themselves. Does the UK still share those views? Right now, it's hard to see it. Perhaps the job of the Third Sector is about to shift, and its job will become one where it has to persuade the British public to step away from a blinkered, xenophobic view of the world outside its shrinking borders.

 

The Fall Of Kids Company

Up until recently, many observers of the charity sector would have viewed the youth support charity Kid's Company as a raging success. Its charismatic founder, Camila Batmanghelidjh, had the ear not just of the press but the Prime Minister, who wholeheartedly supported the cause. Donations rolled in from City investors, and high-profile friends like Coldplay, who gave £8million to Kids Company. In 2013, estimates pegged the charity's income at a little over £23million.
All that money has gone. Reports note that Kids Company employees had not been paid since May. The only reason that their July paychecks went through was because an emergency grant supplied for restructuring was instead dipped into for day-to-day running costs.
Meanwhile Batmanghelidjh has been forced to leave Kids Company–her departure was a major condition of the new grant going through. Disturbing stories are emerging about the "help" that the charity was providing to the vulnerable kids under its care, and allegations of abuse at its South London premises are also coming out of the woodwork.
The real story of what went on at Kids Company is yet to emerge, although the horror stories of deprived kids treating the place as a bank, popping in once a week to grab envelopes of cash, are eye-bulging stuff (for more on that, I recommend Harriet Sargeant's article in the Telegraph). Batmanghelidjh's insistance on using discounted and in some cases Victorian-era thinking on the neurological links between poverty and abuse to guide the work Kids Company was doing haven't helped the cause either.
Things are only going to get worse, as Kids Company announced it was closing its doors on Wednesday night. Batmanghelidjh's golden touch has soured, and her pal David Cameron, who waved through that final loan despite objections from the Department of Education, has remained silent on the fall of his favourite charity. So too has his gaff-prone Minister For Civil Society, Rob Wilson, whose office deals particularly with charities and the voluntary sector. There's more to this silence than embarrasment at the connection with a failed charity, though.
The fall of Kids Company is yet another nail in the coffin of Cameron's prized Big Society. As a favoured partner, Batmanghelidjh was vocal in her distaste for the way traditional children's services were run. She collaborated with the Evening Standard in 2014 on a project callng for root and branch redesign of the system. In the article accompanying that launch, Kids Company was described as an organisation that "essentially mops up the mess social services fail to deal with." A bit rich, as the partnership between charities and the public sector was the whole point of Cameron's great vision. And of course, as the charity shutters, a fairly huge mess has just been dumped back into social service's lap.
Once again, we see how the notion of the Big Society founders when placed under real-world scrutiny. Kids Company was reliant on public money, and had major issues both financially and with its entire mission statement. Yet it was held up as a paragon of the way two sectors could work together. It's saddening that many charities that aren't headed by a founder with the connections, political nous and sheer charisma as Batmanghelidjh have been overlooked for funding, while the government continued to pour money into a black hole.
What all this means for the kids of South London who were under the care of Kids Company is worryingly vague. We should not applaud the fall of the charity, but its failure has implications for the Third Sector as a whole, particularly in the light of increased scrutiny into the way they raise funds. If David Cameron's favourite charity couldn't make it, what chance do the rest of us have?

A Chokehold On Funding That Could Cripple Charities

There are twitchy times ahead for charities, as the public's relationship with them and the way they raise funds continues to sour.
It used to be simple. Charity boxes in the shape of guide dogs or kids with legs in calipers outside the newsagents. Perhaps someone with a red tin and a placard on the high street on a Saturday afternoon. Drop in fifty pence, and you felt like you'd contributed.
These days, charities are ever more inventive in ways to get us to give and keep giving. From TV ads to the Ice Bucket Challenge, sponsored walks to street workers with direct debit forms, it can feel as if you're constantly being asked to pony up for a deserving cause.
That's the feeling for a chunk of the general public, anyway, who are looking at charity cold-calling and street teams with increasing amounts of loathing. The Olive Cooke case has bought the issue into sharp relief. Olive, one of the British Legion's longest-serving poppy sellers, was found dead at the bottom of the Avon Gorge in May, following a newspaper article in which she had claimed she was suffering from depression brought on by the high number of donation requests she recieved. Some newspaper reports reported that over 270 such requests had come through her letterbox in a single month.
In the light of that, and the ongoing media furore (ever alert to the chance of a headline, even Prime Minister David Cameron has weighed in with a comment, setting his Minister for Civil Society onto the Fundraising Standards Board) public opinion has cooled yet further. A letter template requiring charities to stop cold-calling launched by BBC's The One Show was downloaded 18,000 times in a week. There are concerns that it's unclear how to opt out of a charity's subscription list, or that those lists are shared between organisations.
All of which leads to one conclusion: charities are out of control when it comes to getting hold of our money. Right?
Wrong.
There are very clear controls in place for how charities contact the public and opt-outs have to be in place on any communication by law. Horror stories like that of Olive Cooke inevitably lead to a spike in complaints from people who suddenly feel like victims of a pernicious cold-call culture, lumping charity calls in with PPI and utility suppliers as invaders of the sanctity of the English home. Worse still, this article in the Manchester Evening News lumps street fundraising in with unlicensed busking and even begging as nuisances that are to be cracked down on buy council officers in the busy Market Street area of the city.
It's possible that the Institute of Fundraising could become more involved in drafting and enforcing guidelines, but there is no clear sign that this is likely. Ministerial involvement is likely to be fleeting, fading away as soon as the cameras switch off.
But the damage has already been done. The increasingly poor image of traditional charity fund-raising has taken another hit, and leaves us with a worrying question. As the Third Sector is asked to do more to plug the gap in funding torn open by austerity measures, and at the same time are crippled in how they raise funds to do that work, how long will it take before charities start to fold and more and more vulnerable people are left out in the cold?

Watching The Future

I am, it has to be said, something of a techie. I'm writing this piece on the move using an iPad connected to a Bluetooth keyboard, tethered wirelessly to the 3G on my obscure-brand Chinese smartphone to access the web. So, of course, people have been asking me what I think of the Apple Watch.
That's an interesting question, and the Apple Watch is an interesting item. It's Apple's first move into the fashion arena, offering the must-have accessory of the spring/summer season. It comes in a huge range of prices and finishes, right up to a solid gold offering for £13K. Which seems a lot, until you actually look at what that money will get you for a gold watch in the current marketplace. In the world of luxury watches, thirteen grand is entry level. And those things only really tell the time.
The most intriguing part of Apple's recent presentation that launched the Watch wasn't about that object of desire at all. It was about the way their mobile operating system, iOS, is entering into ever tighter integration with health and medical services, even to the point of gamifying research into diseases like Parkinson's. It's often difficult to get people to sign up for medical research. If you make it as easy as playing a game on your phone, your database of results (and hence their likely viability) will go through the roof.
This is fascinating stuff, and opens up the notion of a wrist-worn computer (that, don't forget, has a built-in heart monitor) to all sorts of potential uses. A recent article in the Guardian put the case for the Apple Watch changing the way we donate and interact with charity and social issues.
Take the humble charity wristband. They're a blazing success story, with millions sold every year. What if, instead of buying a band for your favourite charity, you could download a branded watchface instead? It would cost the same to buy, but the charity wouldn't have to pay for manufacturing and distribution. More money therefore goes to the cause you want to support.
With location-based services very much at the heart of the modern mobile experience, the chance to be gently reminded about social issues when you're out and about comes into play. The Guardian uses the example of a nudge to sign a petition when you're near the obnoxious anti-homeless spikes that have been appearing on our streets, but maybe pop-ups when you're approaching your local Oxfam about their newest campaign could be a thing.
Health tracking is a big part of the reason many people buy a smart watch, and there are all sorts of opportunities to use that information to do good things. Virtual marathons, for example, where you can donate the miles you walk or travel in a day towards a cause. This is already happening in places that support the BetterWorld initiative (like my hometown of Reading), where you can log your activity and exchange it for goods and services. Then, of course, there's the advantage of wearing a health tracker that can automatically contact the emergency services the moment it detects a problem.
Of course, there are potential pitfalls to this new paradigm. No-one wants to be bombed with petition requests every fifty yards. Consent is key, as is the ability to easily adjust your preferences should you sign up to a service in a charitable flush only to find out that it really isn't what you expected or wanted. Clarity and transparency is key (as it should be in any charitable transaction) if you want your experience to be fun, rather than a chore. Or indeed, a privacy issue.
It's early days for the technology, and we already have naysayers and critics unifying against Apple, before they even go on sale. Experienced observers have, of course, seen all this before, and you could fill an article with negative early reaction to the iPod, iPad and iPhone that tend to blur into one comment--no-one will want one. The opposite has usually been the case, to the point where Apple's designs aren't just ubiquitous, but massively influential. There's a reason phones all look the same these days.
Although it would be foolish to predict the success of one product based on the performance of others, it feels likely that there will be a lot of people sporting an Apple Watch, or the Android equivalent, over the next few years. It will be fascinating to see how the move to a wrist-based way of looking at the world of information will change things. Let's hope that change is positive.

Rethinking Charity

We think of the business and charity sectors as fundamentally different. But at their core, they have the same purpose; to make money for other people. For businesses, it's their shareholders. Charities are beholden to the good causes they help to support.

And yet, if a charity spends more than the absolute bare minimum on staffing, admin or heaven help us investment in the future, then we're on their necks like a pack of howling dogs. For the business sector, this is essential. Without it, a venture simply won't be able to survive. Why do we feel that charities are unable to do the same? In the long run, isn't it better for the people that any given charity is trying to help to have a strong, healthy organisation that's going to be much more productive and capable of doing the very thing they were formed to do?

As charities are asked to do more with less funding and fewer resources in Cameron's laughable Big Society, it's time for us to reconsider charity, and more specifically our attitude towards it. Today, rather, than waffle on at length, I want to point you in the direction of a TED talk by activist and fundraiser Dan Pallotta, which calls for just such a rethink--and more importantly, how it might be achieved.

If you have any interest at all in the future of fundraising, then I urge you to set aside twenty minutes and watch this video. It might just change the world of charity for you.

Scant Relief From Red Nose Day

Friday's edition of Comic Relief was yet again, a resounding success. Over £65 million in pledges and donations make it, for the charity sector, the success story to emulate. But in a lot of ways it's an outlier, the point on the curve that doesn't make sense.
On the whole, the news for charities is grim. They are being asked to do far, far more with much, much less. Meanwhile, the amount given to charity each year by the public and other benefactors is dropping. As their funding is slashed, their remit from the government is ever urgent; find a way to do your job more efficiently.
So are there ways in which charities can use the Comic Relief model to help their funding efforts? Well, yes, in a way. As long as we bear in mind just what an unusual example Comic Relief actually is.
A survey published last week in The Guardian showed that people are more likely to give if they have a better idea of where their money is going. Transparency is vital. If people feel that a charity can clearly explain how their donation is used, and that the money they give does actually make a difference, then there's a much better chance that they'll put their hands in their pockets. Comc Relief have always been good at this, regularly devoting hours of TV programming to show where the money they raise is going, and what it's doing, from Tanzania to Tyneside.
There's also more chance of a donation being made if you're persuasive and make it easy to pay. Again, Comic Relief is great at this. There's a solid push towards the final night's events for months beforehand, with massive cross-platform promotion in print, TV and online. You can donate online, through any bank, via street collection, and most importantly for the 18-34 year old demographic, via text message. If you make donation a process that can be done in seconds without moving from your sofa, then you're much more likely to get money.
There's a flip side to this, of course. Comic Relief has a reach that no other charity can match. It has easy access to celebrity endorsement, and to prime time telly. It's fun and glamourous, making us feel good about giving. It shouldn't feel like a chore, which is vital as, according to the Ipsos Mori survey, people feel less and less that giving to charity is an obligation. If they don't feel they should donate, then the trick is to make them want to pull out their wallet.
There's also the incredibly strong branding. Red Nose Day is instantly recognisable, and people get what Comic Relief is and what it stands for in an instant. Meanwhile, there are 23 charities in England and Wales with autism in their name, eight of those in London. Who do you choose to give your hard-earned cash to? Why should you bother?
Depressing as it seems, market forces are making a big impact on the Third Sector, and charities need to respond in order to survive. Comic Relief offers some lessons, but at the same time it's a brand and a business model apart, with resources and connections that most charities can't even dream of. In an age when the Third Sector is feeling the squeeze from every direction at once, the success of Comic Relief only brings their own problems into ever starker focus. And that, frankly, is no laughing matter.

Imagine All The People

The London 2012 Olympics came to an end last night, the flames in the cauldron flickering out as Take That serenaded a packed stadium. It has been a remarkable, massively successful Games on every front.

But what have we learned?

Well, we've learned that War On Want know how to pull off a direct action, as they fired a projection onto a building overlooking the Olympic Park. A triumph, and one that must have had Adidas executives screaming with rage.

We found out that Fairtrade has a high profile supporter--none other than one of the most highly decorated Olympians of all time, Sir Steve Redgrave. He has a clothing line, FiveG, that uses organic cotton sourced from Mali.

We even learnt that King Of The Stadium Mo Farah's signature move, the Mo-Bot, had a surprising origin. It was created on comedy sport quiz A League Of Their Own by host James Corden and Auntie Olympic herself, Clare Balding. Here's the proof...

The word on everyone's lips following the Games is legacy. How do we take the vast amount of good will and positive energy generated by the Olympics and convert it into something lasting, of real worth?

I'd argue that what we have seen over the past fortnight is the first working example of David Cameron's Big Society in action. 70,000 volunteers, working selflessly and with good humour for the greater good. Now, it might be a bit more tricky to persuade people that clearing an old bit of brownfield to make a park or allotments is as much fun as being at the Games, but I can pretty much guarantee that Olympics GamesMakers are the kind of Britons who will wake up this morning and think "Right. What's next?"

The trick for the Coalition now is, just this once, not to fumble the ball or trip over their own feet. Community projects have the people and the will in place, more now than in any time in the past couple of years. With a bump in funding, Cameron could find his pet initiative will suddenly take off and fly. Don't make me tell you how easy it would be to find the cash. 

If we want to have a real legacy from these amazing two weeks, then let's do better than compulsory team games in school. Let's take the example of the selfless volunteers who received the biggest round of applause at both the opening and closing ceremonies of the Games. Let's make the volunteer sector a real force for good in this country, and put together a legacy that really could inspire a generation.