Is the UK as generous when it comes to charities as we would like to think?

One of the more heartening after effects of the recent riots has been the charitable donations that the shocking images have drawn. From the £22,000 given via justgiving to Ashraf Rossli the Malaysian student whose mugging was caught on camera to the £13,000 donated to the “We Love London Fund” the response has been strong. However, generally the outlook for charities is looking bleak. 2,000 UK charities have had their funding cut by the government by a total of more than £100m and the Institute of Fundraising recently showed that 76% of charity senior executives believe that donations this Christmas will stagnate or decrease.

As a nation we like to see ourselves as generous, and by and large we are, with the UK government providing $8bn in humanitarian aid between 2000 and 2009, behind only EU institutions ($14.9bn) and the US ($31bn) – an amount between the three that accounts for 58% of all government donations to humanitarian aid. However, the picture looks slightly different when looked at on a per capita basis.

Source: GHA 2011 report

From the table above we can see that Luxembourg is the most generous donating $121 per citizen, and the only country to breach the $100 mark per citizen. The Nordic nations come out particularly well, with Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland all appearing in the top 10. Indeed Europe dominates the top 10 with only the UAE coming from outside of Europe.

Outside of government donations the picture is harder to establish, however, the Charities Aid Foundation World Giving Index from 2010 does allow us to get a better understanding of how the public contribute to charity. Here, the UK fares very well in terms of the percentage of people making a donation.

Source: CAF Word Giving Index 2010

With 73% of UK residents making a donation to a charity in the last month we can see that UK giving is actually very generous. Indeed Europe again comes out well from this aspect of the survey (voluntary work and helping strangers was also measured in the survey where Europe fared well less), with over half of the top ten being from the continent. We can also see that the US fares much less well by this measurement with only 60% of its population donating last month – though again in terms of actual amounts US citizens are believed by the World Bank to be the largest private contributors to charity.  

One very interesting statistic to fall out of the CAF survey is the correlation between GDP and % of population giving and between the wellbeing score of a country and the % of population giving. Here it was found that there is a stronger correlation between higher levels of well being than higher GDP with the % of population giving – meaning the happier a country – rather than the wealthier - the more likely its population is to give to charity.

One thing that is certain though, and in line with the response to the recent riots, the UK is a generous nation with high levels of both governmental and private donations to charity. However, at 76%, the UK population is already at near saturation level in terms of the number of people giving money. With the impact of the recession and the high proportion of people already giving, this number is unlikely to increase. Ensuring your charity isn’t the one to suffer has never been more important. Why not get in touch to see how Emotional Logic’s range of services can ensure that you are saying the right things to your donors now.