3.1 Your experiences of charitable giving

Think about your own experiences of making monetary donations to charity by answering the following questions:

• When did you last give to charity?
• What kind of charity was it?
• Would you give to someone begging on the street?
• What about a charity collector with a tin?
• What makes you more (or less) likely to give to charity?

Here you’re not being encouraged to give to charity (indeed, some people have argued against charitable giving from an ethical standpoint). No one else will see the answers to these questions, so if you answer that you never give, or if you’ve got particularly controversial or sensitive personal reasons for giving that you’d rather remain confidential, they won’t be shared with others. These answers are just to get you thinking about what matters to you in your own practices of charitable giving. Thinking about your own experiences of charitable giving is a useful starting point for thinking about the way in which you, as a member of the public, receive messages about charity.