Help with Charity magazine wants paid advertising

HappySad

Hello again - Humdinger here. I could well be wrong (and do please come back and let us know how you're getting on) but how I read it is this. Someone in the charity is wedded to the way things used to be. Companies would years ago spend commercially unjustifiable sums to show that they were good eggs and build rapport with potential customers. I say this as a charity supporter and voluntary case worker myself; since then several huge things have happened:

1. The tide is going out on print; there are other, more relevant ways to reach people. The mag will be costing more to print and send than you'll have been getting back in ad revenue for quite some time, I'm sure.
2. Print ad prices have dropped like a stone in all titles.
3. There are numerous charity ad scams doing the rounds, as mentioned by other posters.
4. At the moment, the charity sector is in deep trouble because of the wave of abuse scandals just breaking re Oxfam and others; and because of the practice of hounding subscribers and passing on names of donors to other charities (new rules came in last year on this). If companies ever felt that they should pay unjustifiable prices for such ads, these events have destroyed that - why should people hand over money that, for all they know, could be used for reasons totally against the aims of the charity?

Now, I may be reading too much into this but how it looks to me is that you, a voluntary worker, are being asked to do the impossible: to help keep a castle in the air that's going to have to come down shortly anyway. These expectations being loaded onto you are based on an utterly unrealistic, badly-informed view of the world and how things "should" be. Instead of wasting your time and destroying your morale, it might be better to tackle the underlying assumptions and get the whole communications strategy onto a sensible footing, bearing in mind what;'s changed.

Why not show this thread to a few key people? You may be told that it's just a question of will-power, but as a pro in this sector, I can tell you that it's not - again, that's how it was 30 years ago. You have to have a proposition that gives supporters a tangible benefit.

As I said in my earlier post, I'm not trying to rain on your parade - it makes me cross to see your goodwill and labour squandered like this.

Please come back and let us know how it's all going.

Humdinger