Concreció de l’objecte en un cas.

Phillips (1969) claims that the fact that large sums were collected for charity prior to the 1940s is due to the generosity of the British, not the skill of the fundraisers. Despite the common use of collectors in the 19th century, up until World War II fundraising was still seen predominantly as the job of unpaid volunteers, who were often amateurs. Luckily for those in need, it appears that even the steep rises in personal taxation following World War I, which hit the upper classes, did not curtail the instinct of the rich to help the poor. “In the 1920s and 1930s many charities still relied upon wealthy individuals. Though taxation had increased, there were still many more individuals than there are now who could afford to contribute quite substantial amounts. Those were the days when a letter to The Times, signed by eminent people, could by itself produce thousands of pounds, rather like a modern television appeal” (Phillips, 1969, p. 111). With most of the country’s wealth concentrated in the hands of a small number of individuals, raising funds for worthy causes was relatively easy, even without the help of the mass media, as Phillips explains:

For example, two or three people set up offices to assist charities with lists of wealthy individuals (direct-mail agencies were then still in their infancy). These lists were gradually built up from all kinds of sources – donation and subscription lists, published wills, etc. All the organizer had to do was to compose a letter (some were badly written and cheaply produced, often smudgy duplication) and the money came rolling in (Phillips, 1969, pp.112-112).

In the late 1940s, the Welfare State took shape through a series of enactments intended to protect the public from falling below a social

NHS to provide health services to all citizens free at the point of use, while the 1948 Children Act made it the duty of local authorities to care for children who did not have a normal home life (Owen, 1964). To finance this new public spending on social services, the Labour government raised taxes, in a move that many feared would spell the end of voluntary agencies. As Owen (1964, p. 533) puts it: “Was it reasonable that donors, already harried by staggering taxes, should continue to support voluntary effort? This would be asking them to make a double contribution, since, through their taxes, they were already carrying what they might consider their share of the load”. Phillips (1969) argues that further increased taxation after World War II left many hitherto wealthy British with not much cash to spare. Owen (1964) also suggests that increased taxation following the introduction of the welfare state was a

decisive force in the reshaping of charitable giving in the UK – although he admits that there is insufficient academic evidence to support this claim. Both Phillips and Owen agree that the 1940s marked a turning point in charity fundraising, as support from the upper-middle class in the form of

conventional subscriptions started to dry up. As the post-war taxation system redistributed income in Britain, so charities “had to look elsewhere, to industry and to commerce, and to the half-crowns of the public,” (Phillips, 1969, p. 112), or, as Owen puts it, they had to attempt to “democratise philanthropy” (Owen, 1964, p. 539).

Challenging though the new fundraising landscape became during and after World War II, it did produce what SOFII claims to be “the most successful fundraising appeal ever” (n.d., ‘British Red Cross: the £5.5 billion appeal that changed British fundraising forever’). The campaign, which started in 1939 and finished in 1945, aimed to raise funds to support those affected by the war through the Red Cross and St John War Organisation. These

organisations realised that, even though they could no longer count on large donations from the elite, “the country as a whole was wealthier, while the wealth was more generally distributed” (caringonthehomefront.org.uk, n.d., ‘Caring on the Home Front – Volunteer memories from World War Two’), so they made the decision to appeal to the general working population for support. According to SOFII (n.d.), among other firsts, this appeal is credited with launching the precursor to today’s payroll giving. The penny-a-week fund enlisted the help of the TUC and Employers’ Organisation to deduct a penny a week from workers’ wages for contribution to the appeal, and it resulted in the collection of the equivalent of £1.79 billion today. The appeal also broke new ground by launching hundreds of charity shops, which sold donated items. Other fundraising methods included house-to-house collections, auctions, exhibitions and concerts.

By pioneering fundraising methods such as house-to-house collections, penny-a-week appeals and the popularisation of charity shops, the Duke of Gloucester’s Red Cross and St John Appeal Fund raised the equivalent of £5.5 billion. As well as raising this extraordinary amount, they also paved the way for many of the fundraising techniques that we rely upon today” (SOFII, n.d., ‘British Red Cross: the £5.5 billion appeal that changed British fundraising forever’).

How to raise money from a multitude of small donors from among the general public became the new challenge for charities, and one beyond the ability of the amateur fundraiser. “Gone, very largely, are the days of rattling tins on windy corners to raise significant sums of money for the voluntary sector. Fundraising is now a professional activity” (Hanvey & Philpot, 1996, p. 5). Indeed, competition and the need to make the most of limited resources forced charities in the 20th _{century to begin to operate “in a more businesslike} way” (Hanvey & Philpot, 1996, p. 96).

Phillips (1969) offers a number of examples of successful fundraising campaigns carried out by his firm on behalf of clients in the charity sector in the 1950s and 60s. One of his most noteworthy case studies is the Save Westminster Abbeyappeal, which raised over £1 million in eleven months in 1953. Launched by Winston Churchill, endorsed by the Queen and actively supported by celebrities including Benny Hill, it used newspaper, television and radio publicity to amplify the message that the much-loved Abbey was in urgent need of repair work, and move the public to action. The appeal

followed a practice that became a familiar feature of fundraising campaigns from the 20th century onwards – the use of contemporary mass media to intensify their message. The personal appeal letters and charity events

continued, but advances in telecommunication and media technologies made it possible to reach a greater audience than ever before.

According to SOFII (n.d.), in 1981, ActionAid, then a small and relatively unknown charity, became the first organisation ever to use loose inserts in a Sunday newspaper, creating a new format that went on to win many

marketing awards and be copied by a multitude of other organisations. Founded in 1972, ActionAid started to promote child sponsorship in 1975, using mainly specialist religious publications. Like many other small charities, it found the cost of media advertising crippling, especially since child

sponsorship is a proposition that cannot be fully explained in a small advert or a 30-second commercial. Then the charity’s marketing and communication team came up with the idea of using inserts, hitherto only used as

subscription coupons in small specialist magazines, in national Sunday newspapers. The inserts also included a unique feature, which made it easy to recruit new donors: “…a built-in reply form and envelope attached to the fore-edge of page three, folded, gummed, perforated, ready to be completed and popped in the post” (SOFII, n.d., ‘The ActionAid insert with built-in reply mechanism’). The loose inserts proved a cost-efficient fundraising method that soon became a victim of its own success. According to SOFII, as more and more charities copied ActionAid’s method, filling people’s Sunday papers with cumbersome loose leaflets, the response from readers declined.

The cost of mass media advertising proved a challenge for charities – in terms of being able to both afford and justify it. As Phillips (1969, p. 89) argues: “Generally speaking it has been found that the high cost of advertising is only justifiable, only pays for itself, when it is linked to some other purpose, when it strengthens and stimulates an intensive drive or supports a television or radio appeal.” Hanvey and Philpot (1996, p. 185) also document the problematic relationship between fundraising and mass media advertising: “A number of

charities rushed into television and radio advertising when this first became available in the early 1990s, only to find this to be a very costly way to recruit new donors, unless their charity is well known and the appeal ‘topical’.” As for publicity, it was very rarely free. In theory, a charity could feed the media news stories that would give impetus to a fundraising appeal, resulting in more funds raised. However, in practice, wooing media gatekeepers was often time-consuming and expensive, and uncomfortable amounts of donated money had to be spent to organise publicity events like media launch parties and dinners. An example from Phillips (1969) illustrates this point: In 1959-60, for the World Refugee Year campaign, Hereward Phillips flew a party of 20 journalists to the Middle East to tour refugee camps and send their reports back to England. The publicity for this campaign cost £48,659 – a significant sum for its time – although it represented just over one per cent of the total receipts of over £9 million. This was a very high-profile campaign, backed by the British government and the Queen. A small charity with less prominent supporters and more scarce resources would have struggled to meet the cost of such extravagant publicity. The forbidding cost of mass media coverage is one of the factors that have tempted charities since the late 1990s to look elsewhere for their fundraising needs. “New techniques in the second half of the 1990s involve the more sophisticated use of the telephone (researching donor wishes as well as asking for their money) and the development of interactive fundraising on the Internet” (Hanvey & Philpot, 1996, p. 185). In their analysis of trends that are likely to impact upon the voluntary sector, Hanvey and Philpot (1996, pp. 11-12) include the public’s well-documented decline of confidence in established institutions, from the political system to the church. However, they identify a paradox within this cultural trend. “It appears that society is becoming more atomistic, but at the same time, there appears to be a yearning for new forms of association around arts, sports, heritage and types of political campaigning”. The authors suggest that people’s continued desire to “come together” is something that charities should hope prevails.