Philanthropy

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Thursday 2nd December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker]

My Lords, I begin by declaring some interests. I am the owner of a consultancy called Third Sector Business, which works in the charitable sector, and, as a number of noble Lords have said, I also work with See the Difference. I put on the record the organisation’s thanks to the many Members of your Lordships’ House who over the past two years have shared with us their wisdom and support. We are immensely grateful for that. In a moment I shall talk about what See the Difference does in some detail, because it points the way forward for many of the issues which the noble Lord, Lord Janvrin, raised so eloquently in his speech.

Christmas is upon us and I have a gift for Members of your Lordships’ House. It is a sure-fire way to get through the Christmas shopping crowds in Oxford Street. It is very easy. All you have to do is put on a fluorescent jacket with the name of a charity on it and carry a clipboard. The waves will part and people will avoid you. That is because “chuggers” encapsulate what is wrong with the relationship between charities and donors and why that has to change. Currently we have a situation in which charities engage with people in a conversation about money. We Brits do not like talking about money. The Americans do—that is why they are different—but we do not. We shy away from it, so the way in which charities ask for support and engage with their donors needs to change. Why is that? It is because some 16 million of our compatriots aged 25 to 50 are frustrated givers, and they conduct much of their life on Facebook. They are very interested in and concerned about issues. They want to engage with charities but they want that engagement to be fulfilling, rewarding and fun; they want it to be something that they can share with their friends and family. Above all, they want to see the difference that their input will make.

My charity and others—I name-check AliveandGiving and the Pennies Foundation—are waking up to that and are trying to find ways in which we can use the internet, films and videos to make the connection that people want between their act of philanthropy and the output. That may involve Durham Cathedral or, in the case of Bill Gates, delivering malaria vaccines to Bangladesh. We know that seeing the difference that you make is the most inspiring thing and it is inspiration, not obligation, that drives philanthropy. Our charity trains UK-registered charities to make little films that make a specific ask for money. If you or I or anyone gives any amount of money, the undertaking is that we will receive feedback that shows exactly what difference our money made. That is immensely powerful.

Why am I raising this issue in this debate? The lives of the next generation, particularly the younger end, are in many ways organised around the internet. For 20 year-olds these days, if something goes wrong with their mobile phone, that is it; life comes to a grinding halt. Yet in the charitable sector we think that mobile phone technology is new. We need to get the expertise from the private sector and other places to help us to develop apps and so on, so that giving to charity becomes part of the culture of that generation. People from that generation are, I believe, very generous, but they want to give in a way that is different from the way in which the older generation give.

I believe—and I would love to debate CSR at considerable length with the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins—that some of the biggest contributions that our biggest companies, particularly retailers, could make to the charitable sector would be to share their wisdom about IT, social networking and management information. More than anything else, that would be an enormous help to the voluntary sector, not least because in many ways—the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, alluded to this—charities will have to become consumer-led organisations. We know that consumer-led organisations can meet the expectations of their consumers only if they have good systems behind their work to deliver. We expect private companies to have good systems, but we expect charities to run on thin air. That does not work.

My question to the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, is whether there will be a digital strategy in the Green Paper and the White Paper. If we do not deal with issues such as the need to increase digital giving, as discussed in the recent ResPublica report, we will continue to exclude that generation from something that we all take for granted as a rewarding part of our lives. There is a great deal of hope in the work that we and organisations such as the Pennies Foundation and AliveandGiving are doing. It enables small charities, in particular those working with unpopular causes, which will never have the resources that the big 10 or 20 have, to reach out to a whole load of people whom they would never otherwise meet. People out there are willing to support unpopular causes, such as working with drug addicts and offenders, if they can see what is being done. This is an immensely exciting time for charities, and I believe that the Government have an important role to play in bringing together the best of the private sector and the best of the voluntary sector to ensure that we make this huge leap towards engaging a new generation in a new way of handling philanthropy in society.