BC Business
TIME FOR CHANGE? Most Canadians oppose charity donations at the cash register
Once again this holiday season, BC Liquor Store customers can buy bears with their booze: a pair of cuddly teddies, one to take home, the other to be donated to a local charity as part of its Share-a-Bear program. It’s one of many ways the Crown corp uses point-of-sale (POS) donations to help local causes; others include Support Dry Grad, Red Cross emergency disaster relief and coin donation boxes for registered local charities.
POS donation, also known as checkout charity or embedded giving, has been around since the early 1980s when American Express donated a penny for each use of the Amex card and a dollar for each new card to the Statue of Liberty renovation program. Donating to causes while buying something else clearly adds up: a U.S. study by Cause Marketing Forum found 63 of the largest checkout charity campaigns had raised a total of US$358.4 million in 2012. Increasingly, however, shoppers are raising questions about where all this money goes.
While BC LDB covers administration costs and lists how much each school district receives for dry grad on its website, other POS campaigns are less transparent. Greg Thompson, director of research for Charity Intelligence, a Toronto-based registered charity that researches Canadian charities to help donors decide where to give, says the statistics that show how much money is raised through POS donation, for what and by whom are elusive. “It’s something that a lot of people are talking about and trying to get information on. At some point we will dive into it and see what more we can find, but… it’ll be a struggle to get information.”
According to a 2013 survey by Ipsos Reid, most Canadians (62 per cent) oppose retailers asking them to donate to charity at the cash register, with almost two-thirds saying they’ve refused a request for donations. One of the biggest concerns for shoppers is what the retailer gives and gets. Ipsos found that 62 per cent said they’d be more likely to donate if they knew how the retailer was also contributing.
Another concern about the POS donation method is who, if anyone, gets a tax credit. Although BC Liquor includes the donation amount on the sales receipt, “We are not a federally registered charity so we are not authorized to give tax receipts,” explains April Kemick, communications manager at BC LDB. “We would encourage, for example with the Red Cross, if a customer is looking for a tax receipt that they donate directly to the Red Cross.”
For those seeking greater transparency, Vancouver’s Charitable Impact Foundation (Chimp) offers an easy way to donate and get a tax receipt. Chimp operates like a bank account in which you deposit funds online and receive an immediate tax credit. You then choose how much, and when, to donate from your account to any registered charity in Canada.