Covid-19 rocked the third sector in the UK, with many charities experiencing extreme financial difficulty. Luckily for some, funders stepped up and supported the causes they cared about, and government schemes rescued several charities from demise.

Since then we have seen further external factors affecting the fundraising landscape, including the current cost-of-living crisis – which has most definitely altered giving patterns.

The argument

Research conducted for the Big Give in late 2023, found 25% of people said they would give less. Across 2023, regular giving to charity was down four percentage points, from 49% in 2022 to 45% in 2023, with 69% of people citing spending cuts as a reason.

However, despite a marked drop in lower-level donations to charities in the UK last Christmas, many charities saw average gift amounts increase, meaning those who could give were giving more.

The challenges are also evident in the Charities Aid Foundation’s (CAF) latest report on Corporate Giving, which this year includes the wider business community as well as FTSE 100 companies.

The report highlights that whilst corporate giving currently stands at around £4.29bn, if all companies met the CAF’s best practice target of donating 1% of pre-tax profits, this could rise to as much as £9.9bn.

Surely then, in a sector worth £4.6billion and with almost 7,000 individual businesses, we should embrace our power to do the same.

The business case

The tangible benefits go further than simply supporting a charity in need. We can all further demonstrate our collective commitments to being a responsible business, drive positive impact, build loyalty, help to attract and retain employees and customers (with staff feeling like they’re working towards something bigger), and set an example for yet to be established consultancies to follow.

PR land, of course, has the added benefit that we can become influencers to our respective client pools, so any agency adopting charitable giving practices could indeed be inspiring a further group of brands and organisations to do the same. Feels like a no-brainer to me.

Personally, as a fairly recent agency founder, knowing our work is creating positive ripples, even outside our own campaigns, has been an incredibly energising driving factor, and makes landing coverage for a challenging brief all the more rewarding. After all, isn’t making a difference what PR is all about?

The pledge

Many agencies and campaigns speak highly about purpose, so what better way to back this up than for more of the industry to introduce donation pledges? We chose 2.5% as our number, and donate this quarterly from our gross profit figure, but at the very least we’d encourage agencies to look at the 1% end of year pre-tax figure suggested by the CAF.

By way of example, the top 150 PR agencies in the UK have an estimated combined revenue of £1,996,724,000 – almost £2bn. Let’s give them an average gross profit of 30% for argument's sake, so £599,017,200.

If all 150 agencies were to embrace a charitable donation policy as we’ve done, it could amount to £14,975,430 of donations to the third sector economy alone. Which really is not a huge amount if the industry top 150 looks set to exceed £2bn in the next iteration, and even less when taking into consideration the huge number of agencies who fall under this amount – almost 6,850 according to a recent census.

The Ripple Effect is proud to have donated over £10,000 to charities since its launch in 2022 and its recently formalised a full year pro-bono support package for each charity partner we onboard.

Personally, I’d love to see an ‘impact 150’ list launched to champion all the good in our industry and those agencies going above and beyond to make a difference through CSR initiatives.

For now, though, I’d encourage anyone reading this to speak to the powers that be, and question why your agency or brand isn’t donating to causes in need.