Happy New Year!
If you answered the questions in the readers’ survey then, ‘Thank you!’. There will be several blog posts over the next few days giving you what I think are some of the more interesting answers.
There were two questions in the readers’ survey that gave respondents the choice between just two political parties in a hypothetical general election held tomorrow. The choices were between Labour and Conservative, and between The Green Party and UKIP.
Respondents to this survey were 68% Labour v 32% Conservative, and 80% Green v 20%UKIP. The vast majority (98%) of those who chose Labour also chose Green, and a strong majority (59%) of those who chose Conservative also chose UKIP.
When asked about which wildlife NGOs had had a good year in 2014, the breakdown of answers was very different for those of different political persuasions.
Respondents showing a preference for The Green Party over UKIP
Respondents showing a preference for UKIP over The Green Party
Respondents showing a preference for Labour over Conservative
Respondents showing a preference for Conservative over Labour
What I take from this is:
- a few wildlife NGOs are strongly liked/respected/admired and get the thumbs up from everyone – these are especially the BTO and Butterfly Conservation.
- ‘Conservative’ respondents think that the RSPB had a bad year (far worse than any other NGO) and UKIP respondents (and there will be an overlap remember) think this even more strongly. Whether this is anything to do with the RSPB’s policy on anything substantial, or whether it is to do with the name of the magazine or ‘Vote for Bob’ is impossible to tell from this survey. At least part of it will be due to a pulse of pro-shooting respondents that all arrived at a similar time, presumably tipped off by somebody or some organisation.
- those who like some wildlife NGOs don’t like others – those who think that the GWCT had a good year are very unlikely to think that the RSPB also had a good year.
- left-leaning respondents are likely to think that the RSPB, Wildlife Trusts, Butterfly Conservation had a good year whereas right-leaning respondents are likely to think that GWCT and BASC had good years.
So, obviously there is no politics in nature conservation and we are all completely on the same side, wanting the same things, and agreeing on the means to achieve our shared goals. Right.
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Happy New Year Mark. Pretty much what I’d expect. The merest suspicion of not wanting automatically to touch the forelock to the squire is probably enough to damn the RSPB in some quarters.
And of course politics will intrude:
“Striving with political men / may make that cause political… “
Will come as no surprise to those who read the comments that there are two camps reading your blog, but it’s good to have some data. One group appears to hate nature except when it suits them, merely regarding it as something to trample on. Connected to eating too much lead perhaps?
On the survey: some of the questions needed a ‘don’t know’ option. I could comment on some of those organisations but not others, but I think the survey required a response for all, meaning I had to answer ‘neither good nor bad’ which wasn’t really my opinion, and will have slightly skewed the results.
Happy New Year Mark
To follow up on M Parry’s ‘don’t know’ option, rather like I’d want a “none of the above” option on a general election ballot paper as suggested in the GOV.UK consultation on constitutional reform recently ‘ish’. Apologies I can’t find the link so assume that it’s now closed.
In some places you are but a single grain of sand on a beach, with maybe a few likewise disaffected grains. A storm is needed to dislodge the imposition of a two and a half (transient) party system which effectively causes switch off in some areas. Will there ever be a turn of the tides? Where prospective MPs don’t collectively achieve a say 60% turn out (does that happen anywhere) then should there be an MP for that area? Obviously the answer has to be yes, we are reported to be a democracy but a worse case scenario might be that an MP gets in on a derisory turn out …. is it right that politics has failed people such that they no longer engage? Some would say they get what they deserve others would call for genuine reform …. discuss?
Here’s to p2 & particularly in due course where there might be discussion on the formation of the “Conservation Party”? Other parties can apply for affiliation if they are scored independently and are found to offer robust policies which will deliver tangible benefit for the natural environment, not private profit? Then stalwarts of the two party system at least have an idea of green credentials, until the usual u-turn that too many senior politicians make with environmental issues. If they don’t pass go then they don’t collect the next batch of credits, how long before the two parties are scored in the negative?
Ooops. a tad off topic but you did include in the title of this post words like nature conservation and political subject.
I am not sure that the data presented here can be construed as demonstrating that any group ‘hates nature’. I am guessing but I am pretty confident that the political allegiances of RSPB members will cover a broad spectrum from left to right and it is certainly the case that those of us who lean to the left do not have a monopoly on care for the environment. I am all for making the environment as big an issue as we can in the impending election and we should be asking the political parties to make clear where they stand on nature conservation so this can inform our voting choices. Once the votes are counted, though, we should not fall into the trap of thinking there is a binary divide with one side all good and the other all bad. There are people who care about nature within all the major parties and, unfortunately, also many who care very little. To give nature a chance we should make alliances where we can to ensure that nature is given the strongest voice possible.
Happy New Year everyone – let’s hope we can succeed in making nature a little more secure in 2015.
Mark – Happy new year! I found these questions about which organisations had ‘had a good year’ hard to answer. What should I answer for an organisation I strongly support which I feel has not done as well as I would have hoped, or one that I oppose but which I judge has done depressingly well? How many of the ‘BASC has had a very good year’ responses actually mean ‘I strongly support BASC, however poor their performance’? They are (or should be) separate questions, yet I suspect many respondents will have conflated the two, and your analysis seems to be equating them as well.
I think you’re wrong. This poll does clear show something – that you have too much time on your hands. Now go grab a spade or bill hook, get outside, lose some weight and do something useful for conservation.
Happy new year. See you at the agm.
Karl
Karl – thank you for your comment, Welcome!
Do not give a toss about touching the forelock.
RSPB is almost a complete and utter contradiction.Great people and results on the ground,I cannot praise that side of it enough while those in offices seem exactly the opposite and yet they are the high earners,how crazy.
The phrase lions led by donkey’s comes to mind but doesn’t really even then describe it.
Please note I have said that those on the ground are wonderful so it is not just dislike of RSPB just one part of that organisation but one that needs to get its act together and stop bragging about how many new members joining without saying how many left in the same period as otherwise it means nothing.
Dennis, Firstly and foremost Happy New Year.
I think the point about increase in members is that it is the overall figure that makes politicians listen. Annual recruitment is an interesting one as all NGOs lose membership each year and the RSPB is no exception. The fact that the RSPB can then make up those lost numbers and more each year is something they should be proud of.
Hi Mark. I am a Labour and Green supporter and also an admirer of the work of the RSPB and the Wildlife Trusts. However I considered that both of these organisations had a bad year because I felt that the political momentum for improving the prospects for wildlife was moving very much against them and will continue to do so if the Tories are elected in May. On the other hand organisations like the BASC and GWCT have the well-entrenched support of the establishment which is not yielding anything; so they have had a reasonably good year in that they have not really been under threat. My answers therefore did not reflect my opinion of the RSPB and Wildlife Trusts whose work I value highly. I simply see them as losing the political war for wildlife as they have been doing for a long time now. Many Liverpool supporters might think their team had a good season last year because of the way they played but a lot will think it was a bad year after their captain tripped over his zimmer frame and gifted the premiership title to Chelsea!
I enjoy reading your blogs except this one.
After 23 years as an RSPB member I have decided to leave and join the BTO.
I don’t agree with the proshooting sentiment in the recent newspaper coverage, but do agree that the RSPB has totally lost its way. That it spends half its income on raising more money or adverts or management is appalling and in my view criminal. And not once has the RSPB refuted these serious allegations. All they do is blame the attack on shooters.
It is also time the RSPB changed its charter to ban all shooting for sport.
Have a good year.
Pete and Philippa
The RSPB’s financial accounts are available to view on-line and are audited by independent accountants. They do not show that it spends half of its income on raising more money but do show it raised over £90 million (2014 accounts) for conservation after the costs of fund raising were subtracted. It would be nice to imagine that the funds would just pour into the RSPB without anyone doing all that distasteful marketing stuff but sadly that just won’t happen.
Whether or not the RSPB should adopt a policy of seeking to ban all shooting for sport is a matter of opinion but I’d suggest that even if one disagrees with the organisation’s stance on shooting there are plenty of other areas of its activity that are worthy of support.
I would totally support Jonathan’s analysis here. It is not the first time that I have heard people say they are leaving the RSPB to join BTO and yet joining both is really the best option. The BTO is a body that provides reputable research that provides the information that the RSPB and others can use. THE BTO alone cannot provide that because as soon as they start to become ‘political’ the independence of their research would be called into question.
The success of the RSPB in many fields far outweighs the single issues that individual people dislike. Different people will argue with the RSPB on different issues. It is not a single issue organisation and needs all the support it can get.
Peter – I’m glad you’ve joined the BTO. But I’m sorry you’ve left the RSPB. You should probably have waited for the verdict of the Charity Commission on the complaint made against the RSPB – but you can always rejoin later.
Jonathan, I have just looked at the accounts. They clearly show that only around 55% of income is spent on anything pertaining conservation.
Nature reserves incl. acquisitions 33.8m (basically only 26.6% of income goes to reserves or acquisitions)
Conservation research, policy and advisory 36.4m
Both together account for 70.2m which equals 55% of income on conservation activities
Education, communication, membership services etc are all marketing / fundraising activities.
So 45% of income goes to marketing, management, adverts, etc. which is indeed almost half of income!
Are you happy with this wastefulness? Personally I think it is a disgrace. I feel robbed.
Kind regards,
Pete
Unfortunately I think you are quite mistaken in your analysis of the RSPB accounts. Education and communication are not marketing and fundraising activities. They are things like the bird-friendly school initiative and the outdoor education programmes that are run on reserves. This is work to engage people, particularly the younger generation, with nature and not about recruitment. It is a core part of any conservation charity’s work. On this basis I calculate that the RSPB spends 70% (not 55%). of its income directly on conservation work.
But let’s also look at the 30% of expenditure on non conservation work. One third of that is spent on buying stock for the RSPB’s shopping enterprise. This includes things like bird food and birdboxes which will have a direct benefit to wildlife and things like bird books and binoculars that help encourage an interest in birds and other wildlife. Certainly the RSPB could stop spending money on stock for their shops and while that would increase the proportion of their income that they spend directly on conservation to 80%, it would decrease the actual amount by £8.4 million, which is the profit the shopping enterprise makes.
If anyone really thinks the RSPB is useless they should have a look at Martin Harper’s blog entry ‘What a wonderful world’ from 21 November (sorry I am rubbish with HTML tags or I would try to put in a hyperlink).
The BTO is great but without the RSPB all it can do is measure and research bird declines, not reverse them.
Hi Pete
I was going to make very much the same point about education, but Paul beat me to it. The emphasis on nature reserves might have been appropriate in the 1970s, but nature conservation in 2014 is very different. Public outreach is a key issue.
But let’s take your argument at face value. An imaginary nature charity has an income of £1 million, and it spends all of it on what you’d term front-line nature conservation. Then they change tack, and spend £200 000 on marketing and fund raising instead. That brings in £450 000 in new subscriptions and other funding. £200 000 can put towards next year’s marketing, leaving that £250 000 to go into front-line work. So nature is £50 000 better off. It’s not the proportion of income that is spent on front-line work that matters, but the absolute amount. If your marketing pays its way, then it really doesn’t matter how much you spend.
You clearly sound like a decent long-term committed supporter of wildlife conservation, so I really hope you’ll reconsider. There are enough bad guys out there, and nature needs all the help it can get.
Andrew
Pete, others have responded to your analysis of the accounts and whether it is reasonable to disregard the money spent on education and communication as just fund raising so I won’t add to that.
Your overall point is that the RSPB is wasteful with its income and spends too much of it on marketing and I believe this is very naive. Perhaps you could suggest what you think would be the appropriate level of income to spend on marketing. Clearly you would be happier if it spent a lower percentage on marketing but what if this results in less money overall to spend on conservation activities? It seems to me that the focus on overall income rather than the ‘profit’ is unhelpful.
Incidentally, have you checked the BTO’s accounts? They show that it spent ‘only’ 60% of its income on research and surveys. I hope this doesn’t cause you to resign from them in disgust because I think they are a very good organisation. Perhaps it just shows that in order to be effective in the real world, charities have to devote a significant proportion of their efforts and their income to the business of raising the monies that actually enable them to go out and do whatever it is they do to help their target beneficiaries.
I expect Hugh and others are right. I doubt many people had much evidence upon which to base an assessment of ‘performance’ and that the results would probably look the same had the question been simply ‘Which NGOs do you like/support?’. Still, it nicely illustrates general leanings.
Does this illustrate which are the ‘politicised’ NGOs. Can you test the data – which NGOs show a significant difference in performance between left- and right-wing supporters? Would those organisations like that they cause such differences? If you are going to take a stance on an issue, you’re bound to upset some – so perhaps it’s a measure that those NGOs are at least getting stuck in?
This presumably reflects the problems of ‘group membership’. Supporting one political party by default means you are against the other parties’ policies – even if you’re not. (You don’t vote in one party and then get to choose the shadow party’s policy on a particular issue if you prefer that one.)
Does nature conservation in the UK lose because of this? Do you think the current Government feels obliged to be anti RSPB (or at least anti RSPB positions) because it needs to be seen to reflect the wishes of its ‘constituents’? Do nature conservation policies fall into the trap of having to be left- or right-wing so that there is clear blue water between the parties? Or is the environment just not sufficiently important to people to be politicised in this way?
Find it hard to get to grips with RSPBs brag about new advertising got 95,000 new members when also stating that 90% of members renew each year.
Would think that means 10% of members leave each year,!0% of 1 million members surely means 100,000 leave each year,does not sound that good if all correct.
Of course at least 10,000 of the people ‘leaving’ the RSPB each year are presumably doing so because they have died. Probably more than that if you assume membership is skewed towards the older age groups.
I agree with John Jones: I am a strong supporter of RSPB in particular but it and other conservation NGOs have had a bad year: like Labour’s inability to land many punches on right wing fear politics, conservation has struggled to counter the Conservative’s all too successful efforts to add the environment to their ‘fear of the other’ politics.
That the ludicrous rubbish about RSPB spending half it’s money raising money for conservation has stuck at all is equally concerning – especially when people equate education solely with fund raising, and probably are on this blog the next minuet saying ‘we must educate the public’.
Perhaps we have been diverted from the real issues: have a look at page 336 in the new BTO Atlas (definately the evide3nce of a ‘good year’ !) for Snipe which are rapidly exiting southern Britain as a breeding species ‘linked to agricultural intensification and the drainage of wet tussocky grassland’ ….’Drainage dries the ground leading to reduced productivity’ but also, 1 year on, residents of Sunbury on Thames, to faster runoff – and flooded houses. Time to really engage with the big environmental challenges we face.
I used to work in marketing. It’s called fundraising and communications now. It’s about membership recruitment, marketing, PR. The tv adverts came under this umbrella so Peter is correct in his view of the accounts. Before jumping to the defence of the rspb you should speak to those currently or recently working there. Much more I could say, but shouldn’t.
Clare
Clare – thank you for your comment. But that isn’t all that is in Fundraising and Marketing is it? Where is Education and field teaching? The Press Office? The people who do the nuts and bolts of producing reports on the RSPB’s conservation work?
Mark, as you well know, comms is now about engagement with a view to membership recruitment and fundraising. Most of the education happens on or through reserves. Reports are through the conservation teams themselves with PR / media input if necessary. I am well aware of the actual focus within the F&C team. If education was such a big part of the work why is it not separate in the accounts and why has there been so little budget for a new head of education?
Best, Clare
I’ve never worked for RSPB but I have worked for other NGOs against whom similar well-intentioned but unfounded accusations could be made.
Two comments; sadly it is a fact of life that in order to have any money at all to spend on nature conservation you have to spend quite a bit of staff time (=money) and direct money raising it. No-one gives you cash just because you’re a good cause any more, and no grant giving organisation 100% funds anyway. In my frustration I’ve often thought how much more I could have delivered if funders had just given me the cash and asked for the receipts at the end and left me to get on with it, but they don’t. Even if you get 75% for one project from one source (charitable trust say) you still need the little bits and pieces from other sources and members to make up the 25% and often getting that money together is more time consuming than the one big grant application. Once you’ve funded the projects you still have to pay the phone bill and the electricity and insurance and that’s the hardest few quid of all to come by. That’s why core income from members is the lifeblood of any charity, even if in % terms it seems a small and expensive proportion of the total.
RSPB is a big organisation but that just means they need to raise big money every year just to stand still, it doesn’t mean they have a secret money tree in the garden at the Lodge.
Second; think of what the RSPB, or indeed almost any campaigning charity, is up against. RSPB’s marketing and promo budget is trivial compared to that spent by the construction industry, the agrochemicals industries, etc. I’m sure that it’s a lot less than has already been spent just by the “Kill All The Birds By Building A New Airport In The Thames Estuary ” campaign. You think all those industry lobbyists taking MPs out to lunch come free? RSPB gets the flak because they’re the only outfit big enough to come close to challenging those vested interests.
I wonder what the Moorland Association’s accounts look like (are they publically available? – I don’t know)? I’d guess they spend the vast majority of their income on PR and running costs. They do that because it’s the best way to achieve their objectives.
It’s sad, but it’s just how the game is played these days, and if you want to be a player you have to do the same.
BJ- great comment! I think you have summed up the ‘real world’ situation for environmental NGOs almost perfectly.
As interesting as surveys are to look at I think the problem is that people give answers that are a little bias and not honest. Answers are given to try and push the results towards their own agenda. It’s not surprising at all that the RSPB are attacked by the Cons/UKIP & that GWCT & BASC are disliked by Lab/Green. The truth is that the RSPB had some bad publicity towards the end of the year that means in all honesty that no one can say they’ve had a good year really, but they’ve not had a bad year either, as they have had lots of success stories too. The same can be said for the other side too. I know it’s far too much to ask people to answer without prejudice but I wonder how different the results would be if they did. One thing is for certain, the political parties should take conservation more seriously, it’s clear that it’s very important to many voters of all political persuasions.
Bill – absolutely right. I worked for an NGO (not the RSPB) for many years and that is the reality of the situation. We’d have got nowhere without a certain level of marketing/fundraising or whatever you want to call it and as you say those budgets are miniscule compared with what big industry has available to throw around. Good on the RSPB for even coming close to having the clout to challenge the big players; county wildlife trusts and many others don’t have anywhere near those resources so won’t be seen as a threat in the same way.