Chains of trust

Recently I organised a cycling fundraiser in aid of a local community transport charity founded by my mother-in-law.  I plotted the route – 100 miles over the mountains of North Wales – gathered some cycling buddies, and started fundraising.

Now I’m not in any way boasting; so many people raise so much more and endure far more pain in the name of the cause than I did.  But I was nevertheless really pleasantly surprised by how much we raised – £1630.

Some people might sniff at that, but for this small organisation it does make a difference.  It’s around 2.5% of their annual budget, with the added value that it isn’t loaded down with terms and conditions or lined up against any budgeted expenditure. It’s unrestricted cash – what so many organisations are desperate for.

Anyway I was at a conference session on local philanthropy the other day and I couldn’t get the experience of my cycling fundraiser out of my head.  What’s the future of local giving?  How do we facilitate and encourage more of it?  The more I thought about it the more I kept coming back to one key word: trust.  What’s the role of trust in giving?

Why did all those generous donors give money to my mother-in-law’s charity?  In a sense, I think they gave because of what you might call a ‘chain of trust’.  Their giving was not based on whether this was the most effective charity in some league table – that would be an absurdity, as it is the only one of its kind in the area.  Like so many charities, it was set up to meet a need that nobody else was meeting.  Nor was it based on their impact or efficiency judged against some kind of pseudo-scientific metric. It wasn’t necessarily based on a huge emotional connection either – often another strong driver for giving.

Fundamentally, I think the starting point was the fact that I know my mother-in-law, and I trust her.  I know that she has never knowingly wasted a penny in her life, and that she has put thousands of hours into building up this organisation from nothing.  For me that was more than enough to give up my own time, effort, and yes – money, to the cause.  It was based too on the fact that I and other people in the community have seen how important the service is to the vulnerable people who receive it.

And for many of my donors, who didn’t know much beyond what I told them about the charity, they trusted my judgment that this was an important cause worthy of supporting with their hard-earned money and that the donations would be used well – pretty much because they know me, and think I am trustable!  They believed I wasn’t running some kind of scam at any rate.  Plus they wanted to see how much pain I would endure over 100 mountainous miles of course!

This ‘chain of trust’ I think is crucial to giving – whether it’s time or money or something else.  And for smaller local organisations, isn’t it actually a potential advantage, in the current climate? My sense is that the links in our chains of trust can be shorter, more personal, less mechanistic, less based on a ‘brand’.  Trust still needs to be earned, and maintained – but it has the potential to be demonstrated in a more meaningful way I think.  

Local groups can bring donors to the premises and show them around – maybe even meet some beneficiaries who have been helped by the service.  They can even have their volunteers meet the founder or director or chair of the organisation.  How much better to be able to see with your own eyes the impact of your gift – to feel that it means something – than to rely on information in a report?  Can the big-brand national charities do this?  In the same way?  I suspect it’s much harder.  

If you don’t agree with me, consider this.  In its last poll on public trust and confidence in charity, the Charity Commission noted that: ‘people are more likely to trust charities generally if they, or close friends or family members, have had experience of them.’  Nearly three-fifths of people polled said this.  

If you follow my argument that trust is connected to giving, then I think this is a positive nugget of information for local groups in particular.  I think that as part of supporting local philanthropy and giving in the future, we need to be asking ourselves questions like:

• How do we gain the trust of donors and volunteers?
• How do we maintain that trust?
• What behaviours inspire trust in us?
• Conversely, what behaviours inhibit or break down trust?
• How do we demonstrate to our community that we are trustworthy?

The answers to these questions, whilst they will vary from organisation to organisation, are likely in part to involve transparency and good communication about what the organisation does.  But those are only tools or mechanisms to bring about what really makes things happen – trusting relationships between human beings.