Charity Donations and Tipping — A Very British Problem
Departing from the usual themes in our blog of online training, webinars and networking we’re instead going to look at the World of fundraising.
Let me describe a scene to you. And with some confidence I’m going to guess this is a precise scene you’ve found yourself in.
You’re in a restaurant or café. Doesn’t really matter where or what standard place it is, but you’ve had a ‘sit down meal’ and it’s time to settle up. The food was somewhere between ‘perfectly ok’ and up from there. The service was on that scale somewhere also. You pay for the meal by card and now it’s time to leave a tip, you didn’t leave one by card because you’re suspicious the money ends up with the waiting staff. But to your horror you reach into your pocket and find only a few coins. You furtively get them out and, making sure no-one is looking, add them up. You’ve got roughly five coins that collectively add up to 38p. Whatever the bill was, 38p is absolutely nowhere near 10%. A dilemma begins.
Now up to this point I retain my absolute confidence that you will have experienced this precisely. What happens from here will perhaps lose a few people, but I still feel confident the overwhelming majority will relate to the following.
You’re left with two choices. You were certainly going to tip, and you do tip in general. You only tend to refrain from doing so where the experience was consciously poor. Do you leave a 38p tip and risk offending the server (who was lovely) by making them think you’ve deliberately left a derisory tip as an expression of dissatisfaction with their performance? Or do you leave no tip at all and rely on the fact that plenty of people in the UK don’t tip generally (if you’re reading this in America in horror, it’s true, but we pay our staff differently over here so there’s less of a tipping culture) so the server will not bat an eyelid and think of you badly?
I think more people go for the latter option. The writer of this blog has certainly done this in the past. I wish I hadn’t now, but I have,
This mindset that it’s better to do nothing and avoid the risk of causing offence rather than do something half heartedly is quite a British thing I think. There is a truly frightening level of horror we seem to have in thinking someone we met briefly in passing and will probably never meet even once again MAY think badly of us. It is something that eats into our very soul and absurdly has the potential to cause restless moments of shame and embarrassment months and years later!
This thought process is something that nowadays though has an even bigger potential to cause problems. I mean specifically in the sector of charity donations.
Nowadays charities rely enormously on donations via direct debits and online contributions. Gone are the day when they derived most of their income from cash donations in pots placed on shop counters or rattled in the doorways of supermarkets as you walk out (although you still see them of course). Charities drive traffic to their website to make a donation or commit to a direct debit through online and TV advertising. Various methods are used, but ultimately it all boils down to a message where they say “Please give us X amount”. The problem is (for some) that the ‘default’ amount charities ask for seems to have gone up rather sharply in recent years. It’s perfectly routine for larger charities to ask you to send a ‘text donation’ of £10 or upwards. It’s very rare to see any charity appeal for a donation that ultimately doesn’t leave you a double digit figure out of pocket. Now, that’s not a criticism, charities truly need this money. They need more, but this is the amount they need to get the job done now. The problem specifically is that for some, donating £10 or upwards just isn’t going to happen. They engaged with the story they saw, they’ve made a subconscious choice that this charity is doing good work and deserve support. In principle that person would be willing to donate something and if it was a collection box on the street they’d put 38p in loose change in without giving it much more than a moment’s thought. But £10? Nope. Maybe they haven’t got it to spare, maybe they just don’t want to give away that much (as of course is their right), regardless, they give nothing as a result.
But, and I genuinely don’t think this is known by the public at large, there isn’t a charity in the country currently operating that solicits donations that says “You must donate £10 or more, we won’t accept anything less.” All of them will let you go to their website and donate on a one-off basis, £1 or £2. There is fault with the charity here that they don’t make that clearer. In their desire to solicit more £10+ donations they have perhaps unwittingly created a false impression that £10 is the minimum donation allowed. Or that by asking for a direct debit they make it appear that’s the only method of donation they want, one-off donors can look elsewhere! And it is undoubtedly to their financial detriment. Because there are probably a significantly large number of people, some a bit short of cash, some just not overflowing with the spirit of generosity who nonetheless would gladly donate £1 to a worthy cause, or sign up to a £2 per month direct debit instead of the £5 suggested. If this multitude of people were engaged more, Charities may get a few donations of £1 or £2 that might otherwise have been £10 but they’ll get a heck of a lot more donations of something that would otherwise have been a big fat zero.
Which brings us back to the original analogy of leaving a small tip. When faced with the prospect of leaving a tip that we believe is less than the server wants/deserves, we so often opt to duck out, head down and walk on by when the server isn’t looking. We hope they don’t notice and therefore think ill of us. But ask any server, at any restaurant in the World, from Joe’s Greasy Spoon Café up to a 3 Michelin Star eatery, they will all say the same thing. A 38p tip isn’t what they wanted or maybe expecting but it all goes in the pot and it all adds up. There is not a server in the World who would rather you put the change back in your pocket and walked out than you leave it on the table, small as it may be.
The same is true with charities, fundraisers and charity fundraising in general. NONE of them would prefer you donate nothing than you donate £1 online. It all adds up. Let’s be very clear on the outcomes at stake here. If an extra 100 people make a donation of just £1 who would not have donated £5, £10 or more then that extra £100 could buy malaria nets that save lives, could buy enough food to feed an entire village for an extra day, pay a nurse’s salary for a few days, send a kid to school for a whole term even!
Yes, charities and non-profits could do better here, but ultimately the responsibility lies with the people donating the money as to how much they donate or if in fact they donate at all. Next time you see a TV ad for a charity and you think “they’re doing great work!”, next time you see an ad pop on your phone showing someone in need and you think “I really hope someone helps them”, don’t just scroll on by. Click on it and go and make a donation. Donate what you can spare, you don’t need to do more. If that’s just 50p even, it’s still going to help. It will be 50p that inches a charity that tiny bit closer to their goal.
