Primark or Prada? John Lewis or Debenhams? Zara or Next? Some shop windows are just more attractive than others, and those which demonstrate imagination, show flair and recognise the customer is the end user invariably pull in more punters than those who don’t.
We all recognise the efficacy of that principle. We dress with care for job interviews and spruce up our houses for maximum impact when we come to sell them. In a buyer’s market, sellers have to present themselves at their best to attract interest.
And yet many charity communicators don’t employ these principles when it comes to presenting the nuts and bolts information required of their charities. There is some information which charities with annual incomes over £10,000 must provide to the Charity Commission. These include Annual Returns, accounts and a Trustees’ Annual Report. Some charities clearly see these as yet another regulatory burden, when they really should start seeing them as an opportunity to lay out their stall as attractively and accessibly as possible.
While both charity trustees and their communications staff increasingly recognise the importance of presenting their charity’s website, annual report and fundraising literature in a clear and imaginative way, the same approach doesn’t always apply to the information you give the regulator.
Having an engaging website is a huge plus, but however healthy the flow of traffic it receives, it may not top the Commission’s site (www.charitycommission.gov.uk) which gets around 40 million hits every year. The majority of users head for the public register, with details for each of the 169,000 main registered charities in England and Wales.
Each main charity has its own page, where we link to the charity’s website and to its most recent accounts, and if its income is over £1 million a year, to its Summary Information Return (SIR) which provides more details of how aims and objectives have been met (or not).
It’s an obvious shop window, but you wouldn’t know it to see some of the information provided. We scan accounts, which means every inaccuracy, ink blot and piece of illegible narrative is on display to the reader. The lack of care taken in some accounts preparation is particularly baffling given that charity accounts are the automatic ‘first choice’ documents for funders, service commissioners and journalists alike.
And where mistakes are made, it inevitably takes time to put them right. Pdf documents have many advantages, but the ability to correct a wrong decimal point instantly isn’t one of them. Inaccuracies stay on public view, when a 20 minute check before sending the accounts would have picked up the mistake immediately. 30 large charities, for example, declared in 2007 they had no charitable expenditure at all – simply because they hadn’t read the online guidance notes. The onus really is on charity trustees to make sure that the information they supply is accurate - the public view of your charity will be affected.
We’ve fundamentally changed the Annual Return this year. During 2008 the key financial information we received in respect of the 2007 return will be summarised on the charity’s home page on our website as part of each charity’s register entry. This will be the first in a range of improvements to the online register to allow users to interact with the data in practical ways, making it easy to look at data between different charities and set each charity’s role in a wider context.
We don’t generate league tables for charities – too much like comparing kiwi fruit with bananas – but the difference in standards of presentation, language and detail will inevitably become more apparent. It will be much easier for the general public, or indeed journalists or prospective donors, to see at a glance the information your charity gives the Commission and draw their own conclusions – so if you aren’t already on top of this then perhaps you should be.
And for charities with income of £1 million+ who must prepare an SIR, ensuring input from the communications team is part of the process pays dividends. Our report, In their own words, published in 2006 and available to download from our website under ‘Publications’, provided examples of the different approaches charities had taken in their SIR’s to describe their charitable outcomes, impact and finances. It was fairly obvious which charities were rising to the challenge of telling the public about the impact of work and those which had just ticked the boxes.
Everything your organisation produces, from compliment slips to the annual report, is a visible shop window to anyone with an interest – or a potential interest – in your charity.
Communications experts need to ensure that their board is aware of the difference that involving them in can make; the difference between simply fulfilling a regulatory requirement or of really getting your message across.