Views from the receiving end of charity

After a media launch with a comment piece in the Guardian last week, we spent today mailing out copies of our new report User Views on Fundraising to everyone we could think of who might like a copy.

It’s tricky doing such mail outs, trying to balance the potential of clogging up someone’s doormat with unwanted mail versus leaving someone else’s bookshelf bereft of a report they’d find interesting. If we got it wrong and you’d like a hard copy then please just drop me a line at b.breeze(at)kent.ac.uk

The report presents and discusses the findings of 5 focus groups held around the UK with young people living in homeless hostels. In the light of suggestions that some fundraising materials amount to ‘poverty porn’, using exploitative pictures of beneficiaries to secure donations, we wanted to find out how those depicted feel about the images used in fundraising campaigns.

We found that this group of charitable beneficiaries were largely supportive of whatever methods raise the most money, but they also expressed a preference for fundraising imagery that elicits empathy and ‘tells stories’ about how people find themselves in need of charitable assistance, rather than pictures that provoke pity and depict them at their lowest ebb.

Please do take a look at the Guardian article which summarises the findings, and at the full report itself. And do let us know what you think.

 

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