Big-name charity Christmas cards give as little as 6% to good causes

Published on Wednesday 21 October 2009 21:56

AS LITTLE as 6 per cent of the price of some charity Christmas cards goes to the good cause in question.

On average, charities earn 13 per cent of the cost of cards sold by high street retailers, a survey for Which? found.

Next and House of Fraser donate the smallest percentage from some packs (6 per cent), although both shops also sell cards that give more.

Top is WH Smith, which gives 100 per cent of the price of one set of cards to Children in Need and donates at least 20 per cent of other packs.

Charities earn an estimated 50 million a year from sales of cards. More than half of UK consumers bought charity Christmas cards on the high street last year, but just a third checked how much money went to the good cause, according to a Which? survey of 1,052 adults.

Which? editor Martyn Hocking said: "It's great that charities earn so much money from high street Christmas cards, but some donations are more generous than others.

"Check the back of the card to see how much of your money is actually going to charity."

The Charities Advisory Trust runs the Scrooge Awards, an annual survey which names and shames retailers who sell charity Christmas cards, but only give a small percentage of the sale to the charities concerned. Alex Hays, of the trust, said: "First and foremost, the majority of retailers don't advertise the fact that they give away such a tiny percentage. It's not fair to customers, who won't be aware of how little is going to the charity.

"Our awards are there just to highlight the issue and not to let these retailers away with it."

Mr Hay said that while there was a legal requirement for retailers to print how much they donated to charity, there was no legislation on how clearly this was shown.

Retailers wanting to enhance their sales by producing charity cards approach the large, well-known national charities for licensing deals.

Mr Hay said that many of these charities tend to accept low deals – on average 10 per cent – on the grounds that if they did not take what was on offer, then it was likely another charity would step in.

He added that an emerging trend that was worrying the trust was special three-for-two offers on charity cards, which meant that the money going to good causes could be cut even further.