The average donation to charity has not gone up in accordance with the growth in the economy, and a lot of people are asking why. Have we become increasingly selfish? Or are there more demands on our money?
The last decade has seen something of a charity-organisation explosion (recent statistics suggest there are close to 6,000 organisations with charitable-exemption status), so there are more charities for people to spread their money around.
But there is also just more and more to buy. And from DVD players to runners, the hard sell is on. Not only have charities to compete with one another for the donor pound, they've to compete with multinational companies that have huge budgets for advertising campaigns.
Of course, charities would have nothing like the turnover of Sony or Nike - and even if they did, they would be hard-pressed to justify spending such an amount of money on advertising campaigns. But this is the information age, and if you don't get information out about who you are and what you're doing, all your good intentions will sink into the great "I tried" abyss.
Andy Storey is a lecturer at the Development Studies Centre in Kimmage Manor, Dublin. "Since the early 1990s we've seen huge developments in terms of professionalisation of charities," he says. "The competition has been heating up and the perception out there seems to be: the slicker the campaign, the more chance you have of taking a sizeable chunk of donations.
"Some charities use advertising companies to help plan campaigns. Others do the whole campaign in-house. "Charitable organisations compete through visibility and, in fact, their main form of advertising is unpaid exposure, such as news coverage. When there is a crisis, there is an urgent need to raise money quickly. "If, for example, Kosovo is in the news, every organisation has to be there, chasing the cameras, wearing the organisation's t-shirt. The phrase coined during Rwanda was `be there or die'. If organisations weren't seen to be there, funding would start to dry up."
Being in the news helps raise profiles, so charity organisations are increasingly employing press officers.
Barnardo's recently appointed a public relations officer (PRO), who both facilitates the media with queries relating to children in general and keeps the media abreast of developments within the organisation. Owen Keenan, the organisation's chief executive, explains why Barnardos decided on a PRO: "Campaigning and raising awareness around children's issues is a big part of our role. We also have a responsibility to draw on our experience to influence policy and provision. We wanted to do more, so we decided we needed a full-time position dedicated to communication."
It isn't just a question of material demands pulling purse strings a bit tighter. Organisations find they are competing with a range of messages conveyed by the media which make people reluctant to contribute.
"There is a degree of people being weary with worthy causes," says Keenan, "and continuing concerns over the integrity of charities. "Overall, the public is generous and there is a strong sense of social commitment, but people are finding it hard to reconcile the numbers of unemployed with the amount of jobs around.
"On top of everything else, we find we are competing with a political message that all is going well and anyone who finds themselves in poverty is not worthy of care." Like other charities, using billboards, radio, and occasionally the print media, Barnardo's devises advertising strategies more as a means of raising the organisation's profile and generating an understanding of the reality of poverty. "It is hard to judge how effective campaigns are with regard to raising funding - we don't have the money to do that sort of market research. We use the campaigns as an awareness raising tool," Keenan says.
Most reputable charitable organisations adopt a very stringent ethical code with regard to expenditure, keeping their advertising budgets to the bare minimum. John O'Shea of Goal, however, is strongly opposed to spending any money on advertising campaigns.
"We work off a very low administration cost base, so our use of the media would be something like the letters page," says O'Shea. Goal does have a public relations officer who issues press releases regularly - but particularly when there is a disaster such as the hurricane in Honduras earlier this year or last month's cyclone in India.
"We would address the situation when it arises. There are people who contribute regularly to Goal, and they want to know if we are out there doing something about a crisis."
O'Shea says charitable organisations should not have to waste their time and resources on advertising to raise funds.
"We should be funded by government," he says. "We shouldn't have to keep going back to the Irish public begging for money. We are trying to keep people alive - that's where all our energies should be directed."
