Scrooge awards 2011

This is the 10th annual Scrooge Award. Each year the Charities Advisory Trust surveys high street retailers, to see who is using charity to help boost sales but actually giving very little to charity. This year, in addition, we surveyed online personalised charity Christmas cardcompanies.

Charity cards used to be an important way of earning money for charities. People bought charity cards to show their friends that they were caring, decent people. Realising that it was a profitable market, high street retailers decided to muscle in on the charity card market as a way to boost their sales. With no legislation to control the amount going to charity, companies can give as little as 2% to charity and still label the card as a charity card (EU regulations would not allow a meat pie with 2% meat, to be labelled as a meat pie, but cards can be labelled as charity cards with even less than 2% going to charity).

The Charities Advisory Trust has for 10 years been naming and shaming those who simply use the charity label as a marketing ploy and the findings from this year’s Scrooge Award research (Note 1) are as follows:

- Years of campaigning by the Charities Advisory Trust has successfully pushed the charity donation to a minimum of 10% for many cards on the high street, while some such as John Lewis, Paperchase and Debenhams are giving more.

- 3 for 2 offers at Next, Marks and Spencer, WHSmith (and more are likely as the season advances) reduce the actual amount to charity. How appropriate is it to discount charity? Do you tell a hungry child in Africa they can’t eat on every third day because someone in the UK wanted to save money?

- This year 41.6% of the cards surveyed were produced in China (Note 2). This makes the card cheaper to produce, but costs jobs in the UK. It is extraordinary that UK charities do not make any effort to see that cards are printed in the UK, thus protecting jobs and the environment.

- This year sees the continuing trend to offer fewer cards, with Harrods reducing their charity Christmas card range by 68%since 2008 and John Lewis by 54%.

- High street shops have moved towards more UK based causes such as Macmillan Cancer Support, Great Ormond Street andBarnardos, rather than the big international charities.

- The wide availability of charity cards on the High Street has undercut sales of cards by charities themselves (which give more to the charities) and are forcing them out of the market (for example Water Aid which no longer offers a range of cards but rather relies on licensing deals)

While the High Street seems to be giving more to charity this year sales of personalised charity cards sold on the internet show amounts as low as 1.1% to charity. We surveyed 40 online companies offering ’bespoke’ cards with a charity element (Note 3).

- More than two thirds (67.5%) of the online card publishers surveyed give less than 5% to charity.

- Startlingly, over a quarter (27.5%) give less than 2% to charity.

- All in all only 22.5% give 10% or more to charity.

- It was virtually impossible to work out how much, as a percentage, went to charity, unless you had an A-level in arithmeticand a lot of spare time.

- Many publishers give a flat rate amount ’10p or 5p a card, but they had so many extras for printing logos, greetings, colour printing, etc that the total cost was high, and the percentage to charity very low.

- It was clear card publishers offered charity cards to help market their product. The word ’exploitation’ comes to mind.