Charity grows through credit crunch

We have just sent our audited 2008 charity results off to the Charity Commission who put them up on their website within hours (see SOS Charity summary). Their summary shows:

• that it cost us £0.66m to raise £4.28m in funds last year
• that £4.28m was a 30% rise on £3.28m in 2007

The growth in income has carried on well into 2009 as far as we can see, with:

• continuing rapid growth in new child sponsorships and direct debits.
• first quarter of 2009 topping £2m (thanks in part to a large donation)

The first quarter of 2009 saw a total of 490 new direct debits online alone from the UK beating the previous best ever quarter of 428 in Q4 2008. The average direct debit was for just over £20 a month and our experience is that on average people carry on giving for more than a decade. Given that the fourth quarter is traditionally the strongest quarter this continuing growth is a remarkable result, with millions of pounds of "value" coming from a low cost web approach.

Why is our charity growing so strongly in a recession?

We have discussed previously why we think we are growing so successfully at present. There are three main elements:

• The importance of our work. We see plenty of evidence of "flight to quality" where people are checking charities much more carefully and giving thoughtfully. People understand that the collapsing UK pound causes problems for our work and that it would not be fair to punish a child in the gutter for the UK's economic failure.
• Our focus on the internet. Our simple UK websites get millions of visitors and we do not need to use junk mail, chuggers, TV adverts and so on.
• The way we work. Having low charity admin costs helps, but also there has been a lot of discussion lately of failed aid. Our direct model where a child sponsorship really is about a charity helping a child directly compares well to the "trickle down" approach of indirect aid and the model obviously appeals strongly to sponsors. All the issues of dependency and so on are not issues for us: children by their nature are dependent but by their nature they growth up to independence.