The Covid-19 pandemic rocked the Third Sector in the UK, with many charities experiencing extreme financial difficulty. Luckily for some, funders stepped up and supported the causes they cared about, and government schemes rescued several charities from demise.
Since then, however, we have seen further external factors affecting the fundraising landscape, including the current cost-of-living crisis – which has most definitely resulted in a change in giving patterns.
Research conducted for the Big Give in late 2023 shows that during the year, the figures remained stark: 25% of people said they would give less that year. Across the whole year, regular giving to charity was down from 49% in 2022 to 45% in 2023, and 69% of people said they would need to make spending cuts.
However, despite a marked drop in lower-level donations to charities in the UK last Christmas, many charities saw their average gift amount increase, meaning those who could give were giving more.
The challenges are also evident in the Charities Aid Foundation’s (CAF) latest report on Corporate Giving, which this year includes the wider business community as well as FTSE 100 companies.
The report highlights that whilst corporate giving currently stands at around £4.29bn, if all companies met the CAF’s best practice target of donating 1% of pre-tax profits, this could rise to as much as £9.9bn.
Surely then, in a sector worth £4.6billion and with almost 7,000 individual businesses, we should embrace our power to do the same…
The tangible benefits go further than simply supporting a charity in need: we can all further demonstrate our collective commitments to being a responsible business, drive positive impact, build loyalty, help to attract and retain employees and customers (with staff feeling like they’re working towards something bigger), and set an example for yet to be established consultancies to follow.
PR land, of course, has the added benefit that we can become influencers to our respective client pools, so any agency adopting charitable giving practices could indeed be inspiring a further group of brands and organisations to do the same. Feels like a no-brainer to me!
Personally, as a fairly recent agency Founder, knowing our work is creating positive ripples even outside of our own campaigns has been an incredibly energising driving factor, and makes landing coverage for a challenging brief all the more rewarding. After all, isn’t making a difference what PR is all about?
Many agencies – and indeed campaigns – speak highly about Purpose… So what better way to back this up than for more of the industry to introduce donation pledges. We chose 2.5% as our number, and donate this quarterly from our gross profit figure, but at the very least we’d encourage agencies to look at the 1% end of year pre-tax figure suggested by the CAF.
By way of an example, I’ve looked at PR Week’s Top 150 to help illustrate the good our industry has the power to do.
On this list, we can see these agencies have a combined revenue of £1,996,724,000 – almost £2bn. Let’s give them an average gross profit of 30%, for argument’s sake, so £599,017,200.
If each of these agencies were to embrace a charitable donation policy as we’ve done with our 2.5% Promise from day one, donating 2.5% of profits to small independent charities of interest to the team, the Top 150 agencies in the UK could have added £14,975,430 to the Third Sector economy in 2023 alone… really not a huge amount if the industry Top 150 looks set to exceed £2 billion in the next iteration, and even less when taking into consideration the huge number of agencies who fall under this amount: almost 6,850 according to a recent census.
The Ripple Effect is proud to have donated over £10,000 to charities since our launch in 2022 and we’ve recently formalised a full year pro-bono support package for each charity partner we onboard. Our current partners can be seen here.
Personally, I’d love to see an ‘Impact 150’ list launch to champion all the good in our industry and those agencies going above and beyond to make a difference through CSR initiatives.
For now, though, I’d encourage anyone reading this to speak to the powers that be, and question why your agency or brand isn’t donating to causes in need.
