Results tagged “advertising” from OxFizz

The Charities Aid Foundation reported last week that:

Charities in the UK may soon be permitted to compare themselves to others in a change to advertising regulations.

The Broadcast Committee of Advertising Practice (BCAP) could allow organisations to judge their efficiency against others after a consultation concluded that appropriate guidelines to prevent unfair or misleading claims are already in place.

Charity fundraising is highly competitive at the moment, with the big charities able to speculate to accumulate - ever-more professional funding teams are almost machine-like in their important quest to find the finds to run their charitable projects.

The BCAP consultation raises the intriguing possibility of charities battling against each other. Might NSPCC run an advertising campaign to state that they rely on the generosity of donations, gifts and legacies (which made up 77% of their £147m income in 2008). The message might be: don’t give money to Barnardo’s - they get most of their income from other sources, including the state, and only 24% of their funds are from voluntary income. Or could Dogs for the Disabled argue that Guide Dogs for the Blind don’t really need your money because they have 2 years worth of reserves in the bank?

Competition in the charity sector can be a good thing, improving performance and results. Some in the sector don’t respond well to criticism, so perhaps having charities air criticism of their competitors might be a good thing, leading to more open debate.

But criticism is only healthy when fair, and when there is no ulterior motive. Charities - and more important, the charity sector and civil society organisations as a whole - need to gain and keep the public’s trust. This can’t happen when charities use advertisements to criticise their rivals.

An advertising campaign from Enable Scotland

This leads into the wider debate of how much charities should be advertising, and how they do it. Anecdotally, many people I speak to criticise charities for their use of advertising. Their is a fine balance to be had - clearly charities wouldn’t use emotive adverts unless they generated financial returns or increased knowledge/debate of a particular issue the charity is campaigning on. And yet do some of the harrowing adverts, in particular ones run by children’s charities’ adverts, have any effect? New Philanthropy Capital noted that the NSPCC’s Full Stop Campaign raised £250m for the charity but suggested the logic behind it was flawed and perhaps naive, and that there is no evidence the campaigning leads to fewer beatings. My submission would be that advertisements along these lines tend to put off many members of the public, who query whether the money spent on these could be better spent on charitable activities. And that they can damage the faith and trust the public has in the charity sector as a whole.

The BCAP consultation has some other ideas:

Allowing charities to show advertisements back-to-back with community service announcements as long as they do not exploit vulnerable viewers.

And ensuring that:

Commercial advertisers who pledge money to charity will have to specifically state the proportion and recipient of their donation.

These look sensible. It will be interesting to see result of the consultation.