Let the (Super)market decide?

I was recently apprehended and questioned in Waitrose for showing undue interest in these...


Excuse the blurry picture but my phone doesn't have a Macro setting. Anyway, this is a Waitrose charity token and you get given one whenever you shop. Then, on your way out you get to choose who you want to support by putting your token into one of three boxes.



While I was there, I watched about ten people (three of them children, who get a disc of their own when mum or dad shops) stand in front of the box and have a good think before they made their choice. It was fascinating to see how much time and thought they put into it.

Charities are nominated by customers and change every month. At the moment, from left to right, we have the local Age Concern, a local primary school (who need a new playground) and a local centre for people with learning difficulties. At the end of the month, Waitrose will weigh the tokens and distribute a thousand pounds according to their customers preferences.

First of all, hats off to Waitrose for giving away twelve grand a year to the local community and hats off to them for giving local people a say in how they give it.

But what Waitrose might not realise is that they have inadvertently created one of the coolest experiments in fundraising I have ever seen.

Let's start with the maths. Just look at those tokens. There are THOUSANDS of them. So I'm guessing that the results are statistically rock-solid. I mean, that's a near 100% response from a brilliant sample (Waitrose shoppers, for those of you outside the UK, tend to index off the scale on charity donor files).

On that basis I think we can say that, in this part of town at least, helping old people is more popular than helping people with learning difficulties which is, in turn, more popular than helping build school playgrounds.

But wait, there's more...

The person who tipped me off about this marvellous experiment earlier in the week told me that the people with learning difficulties were trailing a poor third. So when I popped into the shop I was expecting this post to be about how tough it is raising money to help people with disabilities (which I know isn't the same thing but that's what my friend had told me the third vat was for).

But when I got there, learning difficulties had surged into second place. Which makes me wonder whether, once they got to a certain distance behind, people started giving to them because of their lack of support.

So maybe this should be an article about how sometimes it's good to appeal on the basis that not many people give to you and that you're not getting your share. And come to think of it, having written more legacy appeals than I care to remember, I know that message can really work.

Of course, to test my hypothesis I'll need to weigh the discs daily. And while I'm at it, I'd like to try changing the copy and design on the top of the boxes which is rather dull.



I'll let you know what the manager of Waitrose says. Apart from "Oh. Are you that weirdo that our checkout manager apprehended taking pictures of the boxes?"

James