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David Cameron may support local action but what about local government?

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I woke this morning to hear charities leading the news.

It did not turn out to be quite as interesting as it first seemed. Previews of David Cameron’s comments about the big society contained mainly re-heated announcements, such as setting up a big society bank.

But there was some interesting new information, such as the establishment of “vanguard communities” – a great piece of bureaucratic jargon.

Cameron also speaks about “pushing power down and seeing what happens”. Well, judging by what’s happening currently we can tell him: carnage.

Barely a day passes without news of more cuts by local authorities. London Councils, Croydon Council and Slough Borough Council are among the latest to pass on the impact of funding reductions to the voluntary sector. Often at local level the Compact has been ignored.

The government has considerable faith in the voluntary sector, whatever its motives.

But it brings back memories of a comment made by former third sector minister Kevin Brennan a few years ago. He said that one of the things Labour learned was that you couldn’t just pull a lever in Whitehall and expect things to happen locally.

Finding ways of bridging this gap between what national government wants and local government can manage is likely to remain one of the major stumbling blocks to building the big society.

The ideology behind changes to National Lottery funding is sound but the logic isn’t

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The Department for Culture, Media and Sport confirmed yesterday what the sector has been expecting for a while: the Big Lottery Fund’s share of National Lottery good cause money will be cut from 50 per cent to 40 per cent and arts, sports and heritage groups will increase their share to 60 per cent.

The logic behind the move, among those in Whitehall, is that the voluntary sector will get more if the BLF stops funding projects deemed to be “politicised”. The term presumably refers to the eight per cent of BLF funds that currently go to public sector projects.
 
It sounds good for the government to say it will stop using lottery money to fund projects that should be funded by the state. After-school clubs and cancer screenings were examples given by a civil servant when asked what sort of services the new government felt the BLF should never have given grants to.
 
But the first problem is that the sums don’t add up: under the new system the amount of its income the BLF will lose is likely to be greater than its spending on public sector projects, so other cuts will have to be made.
 
And it also seems unlikely, in the current economic climate, that the government will in fact step in with new money for those public sector bodies that will lose BLF funding – those that provide services that it says should be funded by the state.
 
Perhaps ministers are really hoping the voluntary sector will get them off the hook by picking up the slack when these services fall by the wayside. But doesn’t that make a mockery of the whole logic?
 

Charity websites are self-centred and confusing

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In the past seven days, I have written two stories reporting that charity websites have been criticised as inaccessible and frustrating to use.

The first was on a report by the agency Bluefrog claimed more than half of the UK’s 100 largest charities used hard-to-read design styles on the legacy giving sections of their sites.

In the second, digital media consultant Nick Burne said 60 per cent of visits to charity websites resulted in users failing to find what they were looking for.

To be fair, these problems aren’t unique to the sector: during his presentation at the Institute of Fundraising’s national convention last week, Burne recalled visiting the Ikea website and being frustrated that its ‘shop online’ feature did not extend to delivering furniture to his home.

The problem for many charities is that they are unsure whether their websites are for their donors, their beneficiaries or both. They often try to balance the two, awkwardly adding a ‘donate now’ button alongside information for service users.

On top of this, they build myriad microsites for campaigns that often mean little to users and add to their confusion.

And fundamentally, their websites are often self-centred. Too many charities’ home pages have links to pages on ‘who we are’, ‘what we do’ and ‘how you can help us’ rather than asking users ‘who are you?’ then directing them to services that might be of use.

If ill-designed websites thwart 60 per cent of visits, they must cost the sector a fortune. Now is not the easiest time for charity’s communications team to be asking the chief exec for more money, but if they don’t do something soon, they will pay in the long term.

Quick, savage cuts may be good for the economy but they will damage the voluntary sector

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A few weeks ago, Nick Hurd, the new minister for civil society, toured Paddington Development Trust, a charity that provides community services.

Afterwards he declared himself well satisfied. The trust, he said, was an “emblem of the big society in action”.

Barely a fortnight later Hurd’s colleagues in the Communities and Local Government department stepped in and made a decision which will take hundreds of thousands out of the trust’s £3.4m budget this year and much more in years to come. The trust fears it could eventually lose three quarters of its funding.

CLG has written to councils telling them it is immediately stopping funding worth £1.2 billion. Programmes such as the Working Neighbourhoods Fund and the Connecting Communities scheme will not receive a penny more. In many cases local authorities, struggling to cope with huge drops in their budgets, have simply passed them on to the third sector.

The government has said that cutting quickly will mean cutting less. But instantaneous cuts do more damage. Charities have no time to plan how to manage them, or find alternative sources of funding; nor can they simply stop their programmes overnight. Campaigns cannot be instantaneously un-organised, premises un-rented, employees un-hired.

The cuts have come so quickly that many organisations will not have time to adapt. Rather than retrenching, and starting again with a lower budget, many will go to the wall.

With them will go the knowledge, experience and dedication of the workers they employed, the funding and goodwill they leveraged from the community, and the reputation and trust they had carefully fostered. They will not be easy to get back.

The principle behind the big society is the growth of communities – making them stronger and more resilient. But communities are like rainforest. They take a long time to grow, and have a complex ecosystem. The government’s decision will destroy part of that ecosystem. It will not be easy to regrow.
 

I’m willing to bet Nick Hurd a tenner the big society bank won’t open on time

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The Cabinet Office recently laid out clear goals in its structural reform plan for what it will achieve, and when.

The plan is a set of apparently cast-iron policy guarantees that the third sector can rely on.

It includes 14 measures to bring about the prophesied big society, which if they are kept will have largely transformed the third sector by the middle of next year.

The measures include initiatives to reduce bureaucracy for small charities by autumn, a fund for communities by Christmas, a new generation of community organisers in the new year, and a functional Big Society Bank before the chocolate eggs are opened on Easter morning.

Given the propensity of governments to miss targets by a country mile, the list appears to offers several substantial hostages to fortune. It would be amazing if all these targets were hit.

It is more likely that as pressure grows, resources are cut and deadlines approach, many of them will recede into the distance like the end of the rainbow.

One in particular which seems optimistic is the promise to set up a Big Society Bank in ten months.

It’s a great idea which really needs to happen, but before the first funds can be committed, a lot of infrastructure must be constructed – there are offices to be chosen, staff to be hired, innumerable legal hurdles to be overcome.

The money that is to be lent must also be extracted from the vaults of a group of recalcitrant banks that are noticeably short of cash.

The Big Society Bank is the first creation of its kind, a cutting-edge concept which could be the envy of the world. And because it is cutting edge, it will run into a huge number of unexpected hurdles which will need to be overcome on the way, and which have probably not been factored into this plan.

I’m willing to bet Nick Hurd, the Minister for Civil Society, a tenner that there will be no funds from the Big Society Bank available by April. I’m pretty confident my money’s safe – although it’s a bet I’d be happy to lose.

Proceed with caution on the Right to Ask

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The Institute of Fundraising has been holding more meetings about a campaign it is planning which has been provisionally called Right to Ask although it has also been mooted that it could be called Right to Give.

It’s not surprising that the launch has been delayed from the original target of spring this year. It raises a lot of difficult questions that need to be carefully thought through.

If you asked your friends down the Dog and Duck if charities had a right to ask and the public had a right to give, they would look at you in bewilderment and say “of course they do – what’s the problem?”

But when you scratch the surface of this mooted campaign, you soon realise that this is mainly about the voluntary sector’s concern about no cold calling zones and the public view of face to face fundraising and telephone fundraising.

Back at the Dog and Duck, you’d get a different reaction if you asked people what they thought about those specific things. Not everyone likes fundraisers knocking on their door, stopping them in the street and ringing them up when they’ve got the kids in the bath.

The danger of some kind of general campaign is that will create a link in people’s mind between the bits of fundraising they don’t object to and the bits that many do.

Isn’t it better to work on specific difficult issues rather than try to make them acceptable by equating them with general principles that people don’t object to?

 

More proof is needed that the big society can be built with a nudge

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Persuasion is better than compulsion in making good citizens. So said Conservative decentralisation minister Greg Clark last week.

It is hard to dissent from that. One of New Labour’s enduring flaws was an unerring tendency to pass a law if it came across any form of behaviour it didn’t regard as wholesome.
 
Clark was taking part in a seminar to introduce research from Manchester and Southampton Universities on how to nudge citizens into becoming civic-minded and participating in socially responsible activities. Nudge has quickly become one of the Conservatives’ emerging policy tools, so it was a tad ironic that the research was commissioned by Labour three years ago, then hastily re-branded into providing an evidence base for the big society. But let’s not dwell on that.
 
In fact, the results gave a mixed message on the feasibility of the government’s big society plans. Yes, things like praise, recognition and simply asking can induce changes in behaviour. The experiments showed impressive results in getting people to recycle more and give to charity, though it wasn’t exactly rocket science
 
But volunteering proved a much harder nut to crack. In one experiment, callers to a local authority call centre were asked if they would like to take action on community issues in their local area. Sixty-three people said yes, but by the time the voluntary scheme was launched six months later only one person actually got involved.
 
David Cameron has said he wants citizens to participate actively in running the country. But the economic downturn and coming cuts in public spending will mean those people still in work will be working longer and harder. A quick dose of virtuous civic engagement after dinner may not be top of many people’s agendas.
The “exhausted volunteer” doesn’t sound a like a goer, as Neal Lawson of the think tank Compass has argued.
 
Then there is the problem of equity. As one audience member at the seminar argued, the concept of fairness is lacking in the big society. She asked her partner if he would be prepared to volunteer, and his response was: “Why should I? Bankers caused the recession, politicians spend people’s taxes on second homes – let them do it”.
 
Or, as Nick Clegg put it before he got his new job, the big society is “a bit like being invited to a party in a pub and finding that it’s your card behind the bar paying for everyone’s drinks.”

Fairsharemusic.com faces an uphill struggle

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Fairsharemusic.com launched this week with a healthy dose of press coverage, including this prominent article in the Daily Telegraph.

In case you missed it, it’s a music download site that promises to donate half its net profits to charity – they call it “feel-good downloading”. The British Heart Foundation, Centrepoint, NSPCC and Friends of the Earth are among the site’s partner organisations, but music fans can opt to donate to the charity of their choice if they prefer.

Those charities can expect somewhere in the region of 3p per track. Not a fortune, it admits, but it offers consumers a convincing case for the value of what it calls “microdonations”.

Fairsharemusic.com might be new, but the basic business model isn’t; it follows many other start-ups that have sought to embed charitable giving into everyday transactions, such as search engine Everyclick – which this year passed the £1m raised for charity mark – and Monday, the short-lived rival to the National Lottery which folded after a year.

These businesses have experienced varying degrees of success, and they typically attract lots of press coverage when they launch (it’s hard to believe now, but one day back in 2006 the launch of Monday was the lead story on the front page of The Times).

One thing they all have in common is the difficulty of persuading people to abandon trusted household names. Often, it seems the satisfaction of giving to charity is not enough to convince consumers to switch. Fairsharemusic.com is a bright business idea that deserves to do well, but it will face an uphill struggle to compete with iTunes.

Should academics provide fundraisers with practical tips? I don’t think so

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Third Sector columnist Cathy Pharoah reignited an old debate when she told a Centre for Charitable Giving and Philanthropy conference last week that there was a gulf between how fundraisers and academics think about philanthropy. Pharoah is co-director of the centre, which is part of Cass Business School.


Lindsay Boswell, chief executive of the Institute of Fundraising, resigned from the centre’s advisory body in December because he claimed it did not produce research that was of practical use for fundraisers. 



“Of course there’s a gulf, and so there should be,” David Emerson, chief executive of the Association of Charitable Foundations, told the audience. “Academics are not there to provide instant fundraising advice.”
 


During a group discussion of the topic, the academics in the room seemed to agree with Emerson. “We have to get our papers into serious academic journals; that’s our job,” one said. “And some topics just don’t break down easily into simple chunks that you could talk about in the pub.”
 


Another bold academic ventured: “We all have brains and we don’t use them enough. If a paper looks difficult to read, just spend time getting to grips with it.” 
 


But the fundraisers in the room thought differently. “We find a lot of the difficult academic papers hard to deal with,” one said. This is almost certainly why a new report by another philanthropy academic, Beth Breeze, called How Donors Choose Charities, was a big hit at the conference. It was academic, based on interviews with charity donors, but it was packed with accessible, easy-to-read anecdotes. 
 


But I’m not convinced that more academics should adopt this halfway house approach. They’re right to say that universities are not designed to provide practical tips, even if – as some fundraisers argue – it could help them to justify the government funding they receive. 
 


Fundraisers and academics are different animals, and quite rightly have different roles. It should be an added bonus, not the norm, when these roles happen to coincide.

If we all gave one per cent of income, the sky would be the limit

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Francis Davis, a policy adviser on the big society, has published a paper called The Diamond Dividend in which he estimates that £4bn more could be raised for charity if people gave one per cent of their income.

Only £4bn? He is no doubt wise to be restrained in his estimates, but a back-of-the-envelope calculation based on a recent survey suggests the sum could be a great deal more.

At the end of last year, the survey by the Charities Aid Foundation and the National Council for Voluntary Organisations indicated that 27 million adults gave an average of £31 in the year 2008-9.

If, for the sake of argument, each of those donors earned £20,000 and gave one per cent, their gifts would total £200 rather than £30 – a six-fold increase that would take total individual donations from £10bn to £60bn. The latter figure is getting on for twice the total income of the sector in recent years.

Back to the real world: when you remember what’s coming in the emergency Budget, and the likely effect on people’s pockets, there’s every chance giving will slip rather than climb in the coming months.

But you never know. Nick Hurd, the Minister for Civil Society, told Third Sector before the election that he was going to give one per cent this year. Davis wants to Queen to urge everyone to do the same – a sort of ‘one gives one per cent’ campaign.
 
Let’s not get carried away. For the next year or two, the sector will do well to continue to receive the current level of individual giving. Whoever finds the key to a significant increase will be a good candidate for the Nobel prize.

(Footnote: Hurd said he would ask his children to select the causes he gives to. Martin Brookes, chief executive of New Philanthropy Capital, did the same and confessed to regretting it when his daughter chose a donkey sanctuary…watch this space.)