Charitable outflow – Newspaper Kommersant No. 163 (7364) dated 09/06/2022
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Fewer Russians can afford to participate in charity, according to a study by the Need Help Foundation and the Tiburon Research agency. In 2021, 44.3% of those surveyed were willing to make a financial donation, and now that figure has dropped to 37%. At the same time, the number of Russians who regularly participate in charity has decreased from 13.2% to 9.8% in just a year. At the same time, the authors of the study point out that after the introduction of Russian troops into the territory of Ukraine, support in the society for previously not the most popular areas of assistance increased – migrants, refugees, people affected by military conflicts and the media. Sociologist Mikhail Churakov notes that the study does not take into account a new type of donation – support for the military and pro-Russian volunteers directly involved in the armed conflict.
Since 2017, the Need Help Foundation, together with the online research agency Tiburon Research, has been conducting an annual survey of Internet users from large cities (with a population of 100,000 or more). They study how often people come into contact with the activities of charitable organizations and how they perceive their work. This time, experts interviewed 1.2 thousand people over 18 years old. As it turned out, over the past 12 months, 75% of respondents at least once participated in charitable activities organized by specialized organizations. The authors of the study note that this is a fairly high figure and it has been stable since 2019. The list of the most popular areas of charity does not change either. Thus, 51.3% of the respondents handed over things (clothing, food, etc.); 45.2% put money in piggy bank boxes in public places; 35.8% sent SMS to a short number. Interestingly, at the same time, 67.4% of respondents admitted that they do not track where their donations go.
Personal participation in charity is still unpopular – only 13.6% of respondents worked in NGOs as volunteers. And the most common form of participation in charity is giving alms on the street and in transport (grandmothers, the disabled, pregnant women, for animal feed, helping sick children). Over 60% of the polled Russians gave alms during the last year.
But there are also important changes. As the authors of the study note, in Russia in 2020–2021, the proportion of people who participated in professional charity on a monthly basis, that is, did something from the list at least once a month, was slowly but “noticeably and everywhere” growing. In 2017, there were 11.6% of them, and in 2021 – already 13.2%. But in 2022, the “participation frequency” dropped to 9.8%. Most of this rollback occurred in cities with a population of less than 500 thousand people.
As before, the most popular direction of donations among Russians is “for the treatment of children” (almost 40% of respondents transferred). This is followed by programs to help homeless animals (28%), the poor (20.6%), orphanages and nursing homes (18.6%), and orphans (15.9%). Experts emphasize that this list has not changed over the years of observations.
But the list of “anti-leaders”, on the contrary, has changed. Traditionally, the most stigmatized groups fall here. On the one hand, their representatives are the most difficult to sympathize with, and on the other hand, only a few organizations work with them. First of all, these are LGBT+ people, prisoners and people released from places of deprivation of liberty, people with addictions, people with HIV. In total, less than 9% of the respondents help these categories of citizens.
Until 2022, migrants and refugees were also among the unpopular areas of charity in Russia. However, the entry of Russian troops into the territory of Ukraine led to a sharp increase in the number of refugees from the war zone. After that, both the number of charitable programs helping this group and the number of people supporting such programs financially increased, from 2% in 2021 to 6% in 2022.
A similar trend is seen in the direction of support for the media and information portals. As Kommersant reported, after the start of the military operation, Roskomnadzor blocked the websites of many Russian and foreign media outlets, which, according to the department, “discredited” the Russian army and “spread deliberately false information” about what was happening on the territory of Ukraine. At the same time, Visa and MasterCard payment systems blocked cross-border transfers for Russian cards, which turned out to be a serious blow to many media projects working through crowdfunding. Such media urged readers to support them financially, and statistics show that this call was heeded. The number of respondents who support their work has increased over the year from 1.6% to 4.3%. Another sign of the times is the growth in the category “Victims of natural disasters and military conflicts” from 9% to 12%.
The authors of the study asked why people donate to charities. More than half (56%) do it out of compassion, because they empathize with those in need. 26.2% called charity the norm of life, and 14.3% consider helping as a duty as citizens of Russia. Often, these motives are sufficient: brand awareness was not critical for 53% of those who made at least one donation in the past 12 months. This figure remained virtually unchanged throughout the years of observation.
According to the results of the survey, there has been another negative trend: the willingness to “make donations to charitable organizations in the future” has decreased to 37%. This is the lowest figure in the history of observations. For comparison: in 2020, 39.7% of respondents were ready to continue to participate in charity, and in 2021 – 44.3%.
At the same time, the frequency of the answer “I don’t trust charitable organizations, foundations” has significantly increased: now it is chosen as often as “no financial opportunity” (56% and 55%, respectively). A year ago, only 39.1% of respondents “did not trust”, and 58.2% said about financial problems. “We expected a drop in the frequency of financial support for charitable organizations, because we ourselves are a large fundraising fund. But we did not expect that it would be accompanied by an increase in distrust towards organizations,” comments Elizaveta Yaznevich, head of the research department at the Need Help Foundation. In her opinion, “special attention” requires an analysis of the information field around the work of non-profit organizations in recent months.
Director of the Center for Humanitarian Technologies and Research “Social Mechanics” Mikhail Churakov believes that the study does not reveal another area of charity that has rapidly gained weight in the volume of assistance in the past six months – support for the warring armies and volunteers of Russia and the LDNR. According to him, the fees here already amount to hundreds of millions of rubles, the number of participants – tens of millions. “Probably, this phenomenon, the change in the structure of the problematic, influenced the decline in indicators in other traditional areas of charitable activity,” says Mr. Churakov. A decrease in the volume of traditional private philanthropy, in his opinion, looks “very likely” due to the projected decline in Russian GDP as a whole. However, it is difficult to talk about specific figures, Mikhail Churakov adds, since there is a wide spread of expert estimates even on macro indicators of the development of the Russian economy.
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