‘It is not what you give that matters but what matters is that you give’: The One Percent Difference campaign in Ireland

Abstract

This commentary concerns itself with ‘The One Percent Difference’ campaign that was recently launched in Dublin, Ireland. The purpose of this media campaign is to increase, by one percent, the amount of time and/or money that Irish people give to charitable organisations. While the author is not against the principle of raising awareness around volunteering and increasing charitable giving in Irish society, an ideological analysis of this campaign reveals the prevalence of a number of noted neo-liberal assumptions which in their sum, promote an individualistic and depoliticised construction of volunteering. Furthermore, by placing its focus on the actions of private citizens the campaign fails to acknowledge how the austerity measures adopted by the Irish state have effectively crippled the Irish voluntary and community sector.

Keywords

charitable giving ideological analysis Irish society neo-liberal ideologies volunteerism

From 1994 to 2008, Ireland experienced a period of unprecedented economic growth which resulted in high employment levels (68.1 percent in 2006), strong economic productivity and good standards of living. By 2005 Ireland was the second wealthiest country in Europe after Luxembourg in terms of Gross Domestic Product (Kirby, 2008: 19). However, by 2008, the Celtic Tiger, as this period was commonly known, was in a state of collapse due to an overheated housing market, a poorly regulated banking sector and the onset of a global recession. Since then the Irish public has been coming to terms with just how this economic growth was unevenly distributed, both spatially and socially, and grossly mismanaged and administered by the Irish state. In order for the Irish banking sector to remain solvent the Irish government applied for an International Monetary Fund/European Union/European Central Bank loan of €67.5 billion to help recapitalise the sector. Since then a strict policy of austerity has been adopted in relation to all state expenditure to meet the repayment schedule of this loan. By October 2013, the eighth austerity budget was passed and by then a total of €28 billion had been taken out of the state finances through increased taxes and cuts in public spending (The Economist, 2013).

For the community and voluntary sector in Ireland, the impact of the recession was immediately felt. In 2008, the voluntary and community sector contributed €6.5 billion to the economy and employed 53,098 people (full time equivalents). For this return, the state gave €1.89 billion in state funding (Harvey, 2012: 3). One year later in 2009, a study conducted by The Wheel (cited in Donnelly-Cox and McGee, 2011: 111) found that 75 percent of the community and voluntary groups included in the sample experienced a decline in their revenue, and 35 percent noted a decrease in public donations. Moreover, from 2008 to 2012, the level of state funding for this sector has fallen by 2.82 percent on pre-2008 figures (Harvey, 2012: 3). As a result the sector has contracted by 35 percent, with over 11,150 jobs projected to be lost by the end of 2013 (Harvey, 2012: 3). These reduced funding streams have a direct impact on staffing levels, salaries for staff as well as work and services offered.

While the scale of such a retraction is alarming in its own right, negatively impacting on services, many commentators have queried the impact that austerity itself is having on civic society. For instance, in 2012, Mario Draghi, President of the European Central Bank, announced in an interview that the economic crisis that precipitated austerity effectively signalled the decline of the European ‘social model’ (quoted in Blackstone, Karnitschnig and Thomson, 2012). As a consequence, it has become all the more important to consider how, and to what extent, cuts in community and welfare services will impact on the social contract in Ireland. Will austerity destabilise the Irish welfare state with individualism replacing a sense of social solidarity? Many commentators hold that charitable giving, both public and state funded, and volunteering are important indicators of the social capital of any given society (e.g. Milligan and Fyfe, 2005: 417; Putnam, 2000). This commentary looks at a recent public awareness campaign around volunteering and personal philanthropy in Ireland, namely, ‘The One Percent Difference’. The article will assess the message of this new campaign and the particular discourse of charity and volunteering it espouses. From this, it will consider the purpose of the campaign and suggest the significance of this initiative for an austerity ridden Ireland.

‘The One Percent Difference’ campaign

On 19 June 2013, a new initiative by the Forum on Philanthropy and Fundraising entitled ‘The One Percent Difference’ was launched by Minister Phil Hogan, Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government in Dublin, Ireland. The Forum on Philanthropy and Fundraising was established in 2011 to replace a previous Forum on Philanthropy that operated from 2006 to 2010 (Philanthropy Ireland website, n.d.). The Forum is constituted by representatives of major philanthropic bodies in Ireland (including Atlantic Philanthropies) and representatives of various government departments (Forum on Philanthropy and Fundraising, 2012: 4). Its overall aim is ‘to advance understanding, promote dialogue and inform the policy agenda on philanthropy’ (Forum on Philanthropy and Fundraising, 2012: 26) in Ireland. Nonetheless, it also has a strategic objective: to ‘increase philanthropic giving by ten percent year on year in Ireland from its current level of approx. €500m per annum to €800m by 2016’ (Forum on Philanthropy and Fundraising, 2012: 4). To this end, The One Percent Difference campaign is the first attempt by the Forum on Philanthropy and Fundraising in the rolling out of a ‘National Giving Campaign’, a strategy which would

increase awareness and understanding of the value of Philanthropy and Planned Giving amongst all sections of Irish society (high net worth, business, and the general public), through demonstrating their contribution to improving Irish society and the development of community in Ireland. (Forum on Philanthropy and Fundraising, 2012: 12)

The rationale of the campaign is simple; while acknowledging that Irish people give a lot of their time and money to charitable causes,

if the quality of the ‘ask’ was improved Irish people would give even more. The National Giving Campaign is an opportunity to get the ‘ask’ right, and elevate fundraising and philanthropy in Ireland to a new level. (Forum on Philanthropy and Fundraising, 2012: 12)

The angle of this advertising campaign is spelt out in its 2012 report, ‘The campaign would be positioned as part of a movement for national renewal and restoration not only of the economy but of national self-belief’ (Forum on Philanthropy and Fundraising, 2012: 12).

These calls on nationalist pride and philanthropic valour echo throughout the promotion of the launch as well as the campaign itself. For instance, former President of Ireland and noted humanitarian, Mary Robinson, spoke at the launch. The One Percent Difference campaign consists of its own interactive website and a television, radio and billboard campaign. Its television advertisement offers viewers a contemporary and urban rendering of Irish society (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzbYVMkF30U). A bustling train station is used as the backdrop against which we find young and old passing the time waiting for a train connection. The context of the train station is an interesting and deliberate one. Historically, public transport systems were considered hallmarks of ‘urban modernity’ (Lofgren, 2008: 335), helping to forge a nationalist consciousness by facilitating the movement and meeting of peoples from various parts of the country. The juxtaposing of movement (coded by the images of arriving trains and hectic crowds) with sedentary (as indicated by the many subjects in the advertisement found sitting waiting for their train) communicates the message that the pace of contemporary Ireland is busy. As the camera moves across these images we hear a male voice clearly stating:

As a nation, we have been broke many times. With every hike and cut, it’s hard to even consider giving to a cause other than you and your family. Yet, even on our worse day, we still believe in giving whatever is left over to a person who needs whatever is left over. Where ever they are in the world. We’ll do what we can to keep a community or place of care from failing. To fight for other children as much as our own. We help the arts, help lift us. We’re one of the most generous countries in the world. But how do we continue to be generous when we feel we can’t give any more? We all give the same.

After this monologue a female voiceover fades in and concludes the advertisement saying: ‘The one percent difference. One percent of time or money to a cause you believe in.’

An ideological analysis

The One Percent Difference campaign is based on a rather rudimentary idea, to encourage the Irish public to give one percent of their time or money to a charity of their choice in the coming year. In its simplicity lies its apparent effectiveness. As Frank Flannery, Chairman of the Forum on Philanthropy and Fundraising declared at the press launch of the campaign,

‘We believe that one percent can make a tangible contribution to local renewal and national recovery in Ireland. My message to everyone in this country is that all contributions are valid and it is not what you give that matters but what matters is that you give. I am also making an appeal to Irish business, whether indigenous or multinational to give one percent of profits. This combined approach will assist us in reaching our goal of increasing current levels of giving from €500 million to €800 million over the next three years.’ (Philanthropy Ireland website, 2013)

At the heart of The One Percent Difference campaign lies the claim that Irish people, once feted for their charitable activity, are in danger of losing it altogether. While the National Committee on Volunteering asserted in 2002 that Ireland’s long tradition in volunteering was under threat from the effects of the Celtic Tiger boom, namely consumerism, individualism and a decline in community life (National Committee on Volunteering, 2002: ii), here we find a notable absence of any direct reference to structural factors (Lye, 1997). Admittedly, the terms ‘broke’, ‘hike’ and ‘cut’ are used in the advertisement and act as a sort of shorthand for austerity and recession. However, there is no critical reflection on how these factors could be impacting on philanthropy in Ireland. Instead, most of the advertisement perpetuates the ‘myth’ about the Irish as an innately charitable people. According to Lye (1997), ‘An experience or event or thing is mystified when a broad cultural meaning obscures the particulars of that experience, event or thing; this obscuring usually covers up or “disappears” contrary or inconvenient facts’. In this case, we find an essentialism being attributed to volunteering. Historically, Irish society has a long-standing tradition of voluntary community work – from the development of meitheal or self-help activities of local communities in rural Ireland to the role that religious orders had in developing the voluntary social services sector in Ireland (Faughnan and Kelleher, 1993; Hayes, 1990, 1996; Lee, in press; Powell and Guerin, 1997, all cited in Donnelly-Cox, Donoghue and Hayes, 2001: 196). Equally, the campaign taps into the long-standing tradition of conceptualising volunteers as emblems of caring and ‘goodness’ (Donnelly-Cox and Jaffro, 1999 cited in Connolly, 2006: 141). Overall, the campaign takes up both of these ideas to propose that Irish people are fundamentally committed and civic minded individuals, who, by their actions, make their community a better place for people to live in. In this way, charitable giving is set up as being natural, just and right (Lye, 1997).

A further indication of how intrinsic charitable giving is can be found in the accompanying website www.onepercentdifference.ie. There we find a psychometric test which encourages its web users to check just how charitable they are. Such a web-based device invariably lends ‘objectivity’ and ‘creditability’ to its implied belief that charitableness exists as a measureable and observable psychological trait (Cromby and Willis, 2013: 5). In fact, Cromby and Willis (2013: 5) are suspicious of how psychological tests are increasingly being used ‘to legitimate policy’ and extend the reach of neo-liberalism into public and private consciousness. As a result, complex social issues are relocated from the public sphere and transformed into private, individual problems (Clarke and Newman, 2012 cited in Cromby and Willis, 2013: 2). In this particular campaign, notions of charitable assistance are removed from public discourse and concerns and translated into a new form of subjectivity (Cromby and Willis, 2013: 2). This new subjectivity constructs charitable giving as a core personal trait and competency which is also announced as inherently Irish. In this way, a binary relationship is established which is used to serve as a reminder that caring for others is a sign of a ‘good’ and compliant Irish citizen.

The One Percent Difference campaign offers a simple remedy to help Irish people rejuvenate their innate charitability: to give one percent of their time or money to charitable causes. By reducing and quantifying charitable giving in such a manner it proposes to introduce a sense of equivalence among Irish people and their ‘helping out’ of others. While objectifying charitable giving in such a manner may help reduce the personal cost that people may have come to associate with volunteering of late, such a tactic shows a particular affinity with neo-liberalism. The notion that volunteering is a consequence of free time is also a dominant trope in neo-liberal research about the benefits of volunteering. For instance, it was reported that in 1998 the American public volunteered 20.3 billion hours of their time to local voluntary projects (Bridgeman, 1998 cited in Leonard, Onyx and Hayward-Brown, 2004: 206). In Australia, the number of hours given by volunteers equated to 50,000 paid employees (Industry Commission, 1995 cited in Leonard et al., 2004: 206). From January 2010 to May 2012 Volunteer Ireland recorded that 1.37 million hours were volunteered by 34,107 registered volunteers (Volunteer Ireland website, 2013). The 2006 Active Citizenship Task Force argued that volunteers are ‘active’ individuals who show their commitment to their local community by spending time on community projects. Indeed, the amount of time available for volunteering is presented and discussed at length in the document as the only barrier to becoming an ‘active citizen’ in Ireland (Task Force, 2007a cited in Gaynor, 2009: 5). By quantifying volunteering in such a temporal way volunteering is redefined as an individuated, ‘leisure’ activity rather than a politically motivated and purposeful action. As Hyatt (2001 quoted in Bloom and Kilgore, 2003: 432) has remarked:

‘the appeal of the volunteer lies in his or her image as an “empowered” and self-governing person who appears to operate independently of formal state structures … creating social capital that does not carry with it a price tag that presumes the largesse of the public purse’.

In this way, volunteers are constructed as an autonomous and inexpensive reserve army of labour that can be of direct use to the government. However, such market considerations are often camouflaged by volunteerism’s rhetoric of intrinsic personal and social worth.

Similarly, in The One Percent Difference campaign, the act of giving one percent of your time or money is qualified by the assertion that this act of giving should (only) be ‘to a cause you believe in’. In this instance, charitable giving is configured as self-directed rather than other-directed. While the advertisement offers speculation as to the types of projects that Irish people may choose to volunteer with – from neighbour/community development projects to children’s rights groups – their actions are constructed as ‘helping out’ rather than as offering long-term strategic involvements, such as community activism or lobbying. Such a construction of charitable giving displays further neo-liberal overtures. While serious social issues are prefaced, there is more emphasis placed on ‘individual responsibility’ (Grummell, 2007: 182) in dealing with the issue, rather than a societal response. This version of giving to the community is very much in keeping with the White Paper’s definition of volunteering, which defined voluntary action as

the commitment of time and energy, for the benefit of society, local communities, individuals outside the immediate family, the environment and other causes. Voluntary activities are undertaken of a person’s own free will, without payment (except for reimbursement of out-of-pocket expenses). (Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, 2000: 37)

Interestingly, the 2006 Active Citizenship Task Force presents active citizenship as ‘accepting a responsibility to help others and being happy to improve the quality of life of those less fortunate than ourselves’ (Bertie Ahern, n.d. quoted in Gaynor, 2009: 2). One of the main aims of this Taskforce was to encourage local communities to ‘volunteer and help out’ (Task Force, 2007a cited in Gaynor, 2009: 2). Both these policy documents reveal the encroachment of neo-liberal ideologies in the construction of volunteering and citizenship in Ireland over the past two decades. By ‘[n]arrowly equating active citizenship with volunteering and “helping out” in local communities’ (Gaynor, 2009: 2), the notion of both active citizenship and volunteering is depoliticised.

Concluding thoughts

With The One Percent Difference campaign we find that the concept of volunteering in Ireland has undergone a process of change. It shows, in part, a culmination of the neo-liberal agenda that influenced key policy developments in the area of the Irish community and voluntary sector since the 2000s. While this shift from a political construction of volunteering to a more individualised one might not at first glance appear significant, for many who see voluntary and charitable activity as fulfilling a social and political role the entrenchment of market philosophies is something to be wary about. Volunteerism, according to the campaign, is promoted as an essentialist quality of Irishness. This co-opting of nationalism is a new departure for the promotion of charitable giving in Ireland. However, the fact that much of the campaign’s content is underwritten by neo-liberal assumptions and philosophies depoliticises the behaviour it wants to incite. As a result, charitable giving is promoted as a personal exchange of ‘time’ and ‘money’ with one’s charity of choice rather than as an activity that conveys as well as produces social value.

By locating its focus on the idiomatic qualities of volunteering, The One Percent Difference campaign also allows the leadership offered by the Irish government on the issue of charitable giving to go unnoticed, thereby avoiding critique. Since the recession the Irish government has been more concerned with the project of ‘fiscal consolidation’ (Mercille, 2013) than with leading and planning for the future. To this end, the Irish state has set about a campaign of raising the tax base (through the introduction of carbon, property and water taxes), decreasing government spending, transforming the banking sector and reforming the labour market (by increasing competition within sectors and introducing internships instead of real jobs) in a bid to combat its ‘fiscal imbalance’ (Kinsella, 2011: 10–11). These policies have had a net effect of bringing about a decline in domestic demand – falling by 24.5 percent from 2008 to 2011 (Rigney, 2012: 3); a rise in unemployment – to a high of 15 percent in 2012 (The Economist, 2013); and emigration – an increase from 18,400 in 2008/9 to 40,200 in the first half of 2011 (The Irish Times, 2011 cited in Rigney, 2012: 7). Even more sobering is the finding that while Ireland has experienced an increase in recipients of welfare during this crisis period (Marchal et al., 2011 cited in Rigney, 2012: 7), it has been the only European Union country to cut basic social welfare rates as part of their austerity measures (Rigney, 2012: 8). The government’s adherence to austerity has acted as a particularly blunt instrument with which to crack open and widen the divisions within Irish society. To the noted economist Joseph Stiglitz, this rigid enforcement of austerity will culminate in Irish citizens living through ‘a lost decade or maybe two’ (Stiglitz quoted in Thejournal.ie, 2013) where they will struggle to recover, both economically and socially, from the recession. Clearly, encouraging already beleaguered Irish citizens and businesses to give one percent of their time and money to various charities will do little to revitalise a jaded Irish society or to shore up the massive gaps that now exist in the funding and delivery of community and voluntary services.

It remains to be seen if The One Percent Difference campaign will generate the public conversation about charitable giving in Ireland that it needs to create in order to achieve its ambitious goals. The author is of the opinion that such a public debate is long overdue in Irish society. However, relying, as this campaign does, on perpetuating the ‘myth’ of Irish people’s inherent charitability does little to move the debate further. A more critical reflection on the meaning of charity, of volunteering and charitable giving is needed, but if the terms of this national debate are left to the vested interests that make up the Forum on Philanthropy and Fundraising then all that will be achieved is a one-sided discourse which excludes and, by implication, exonerates the state from the debate. The One Percent Difference campaign’s tendency to indulge neo-liberal ideologies places all the civic responsibility on the individual citizen. By implication, it deflects from a dismantling of the welfare state that is currently occurring under the guise of austerity.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Author biography

Patricia Neville is Tutor Coordinator at the Department of Sociology, University College Cork, Ireland and part-time lecturer at Griffith College Cork, Ireland. Her research interests include: sociology of gender, media and cultural analysis, volunteerism and mental health. Recent publications include: ‘Librarian or counsellor?: A pilot study of the experiences of library staff in one healthy reading scheme in Ireland’, Journal of Mental Health (2014) 23(1): 15–19; ‘Helping self-help books: Working towards a new research agenda’, Interactions: Studies in Communications & Culture (2013) 3(3): 361–379.

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