So I duly submitted my offering to the Giving Carnival…..and here it is:

Helping donors give and give with confidence can be boiled down to two main elements: information and simplicity.

Information: Charities in the UK are suffering a bit of an image crisis. Bad press has portrayed them as wasteful and dishonest. Donors want the information that enables them to give with confidence. They want honesty, transparency and a two way communication.

Here we are lagging behind the big American sites such as Charity Navigator but do have a smaller, vocal alternative called Intelligent Giving – a small not-for-profit based in London. The work they are doing in rating charities in various categories is great (although pretty subjective) and I believe that the best outcome of their noise would be for each individual charity to start being more open and transparent.

So, how do they set about doing that?

Well, the most important element is obviously how to communicate with (and I mean with not at or to) your donors and potential donors. I firmly agree with Steve Bridger at nfp 2.0 that one of the best ways to do this is through blogs and social media (of course I do!). The more a donor knows about who you are, what you do and how you do it the more confident they can feel in their relationship with you. To discuss suggestions on how to go about this would take up too much time but great pointers can be found here, here, as above here and, if I may be so presumptuous, even here(?).
Moving on to Simplicity: Once a cash rich, time poor individual has decided to where their hard earned cash should be directed it is essential that we make it easy for them to donate in a quick and (tax) efficient manner. This is where sites such as Justgiving and bmycharity come into play, which enable donors to give to charities in a tax efficient and time efficient way.

Now, one of my biggest concerns about the Third Sector is the ever increasing number of people who view it as a business opportunity. Every where you turn there is someone offering to help you make your donation while taking a healthy slice of it for themselves. In other words GREEDY MIDDLEMEN. A new site to be launched later this year called Thirdsay.com hopes to reverse this trend and bring more much-needed transparency to the online giving market.

So, where are we? To summarise a donor needs to know who to give to and how to do that in the easiest, most efficient way. But, more importantly, to build a long term relationship with your supporters I think I donor needs to know why they are giving and what impact their donation can have. Another carnival topic?

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