The Campaign Company specialises in social research and behaviour change. This is your guide to what we’ve been reading. Here’s what’s coming up this week:
Hello and welcome to the TCC Weekly – the Friday bulletin for people who know their Pence’s Bundo from their Oliver’s Bundo.
You’ll have noted from the freezing weather that it’s officially springtime, so we’ve got just enough squeezed into this edition to keep you going through a weekend that’s an hour shorter than usual.
We’ve got a Values Lab that asks how important children really are, but before that, today’s PPP weighs up English and British identity and where they flourish, and in the Engagement Hub we ponder the state of trust in charities. We finish, as always, with a bang, as we head to Charlie’s Attic, TCC’s scandal-hit charity case. This week it includes the pioneering building regulations saving birds’ lives in Toronto, and a cautionary map of the most dangerous areas to drive in Europe.
David Evans
Director
British city or English countryside?
The relationship between the type of place we live in and our local identity is well documented, but does it also affect our sense of national identity? Professor John Denham argues that may be the case in this article for the LSE.
John explains that the balance of people in England who identify as more English, British, or an equal measure of both, is fairly well established, with a plurality split between the two, and those saying ‘more English’ outnumbering those who say ‘more British’. But this pattern differs when comparing residents of different kinds of places, with those saying ‘more English’ most dominant in smaller conurbations, and ‘more British’ least outnumbered in core cities (although, notably, even there, English trumps British).
London is the only region where ‘more British’ outnumbers ‘more English’ but, interestingly, the capital is the most polarised, with a far lower share of ‘equally English and British’ than elsewhere.
John cautions that, although we know there is a political correlation with identity (particularly regarding Leave/Remain), it is hard to draw political conclusions from this place-based analysis, although it appears to bolster the argument that parties need to be sensitive to English identity to win votes outside the cities. It’s also a useful reminder for organisations attempting to engage effectively with communities across the country, that identity is far from one-size-fits-all from place to place.
With a few major scandals in the charity world recently, it’s worth considering what the effect on trust in these organisations might be, and where engagement is needed to keep this at a healthy level.
The Edelman Trust Barometer tells us that NGOs remained more trusted globally than business, government or the media in late 2017, although it had fallen over the previous year among the informed public, and the UK is one of 10 markets where they are distrusted overall. The Behavioural Insights Team also report here that, although 7,000 supporters were said to have cancelled their direct debits to Oxfam within less than a fortnight of the Haiti scandal breaking, charities remain relatively well trusted.
But the BIT article also rightly mentions that trust is hard to build and easy to lose, and the effects of declining trust do not only affect a single organisation. Levels of social trust in general correlate with amounts donated and time volunteered. Any kind of engagement, whether you’re after donations or not, relies on trust, so it is vital that either confirming or establishing this is acknowledged as a necessary first step in building an effective relationship with supporters, residents, patients, employees, or anyone.
The Values Lab is based on the Values Modes segmentation tool – created by Cultural Dynamics and used by TCC– which divides the population into ethics-driven Pioneers, aspirational Prospectors, and threat-wary Settlers. Take the test here to see which you are.
Values and children's interests
It’s now officially springtime, even if the weather is taking time to realise it. It’s the season when flowers bloom and lambs gambol into the world. But at this time of birth and youth, family psychologist John Rosemond has argued, in the Naples Daily News over the pond, that children, contrary to popular narrative, should not be the most important in the family.
We read this and wondered, to whose ears is this music, and to whose is it heresy? Only one way to find out, so we held a ‘bring your little lab technician of the future to work’ day and let the little scamps run wild with the Values test tubes.
Well, it looks like those self-serving little researchers have found the results to prove their importance. The map above shows that putting children’s interests first is almost universal, with virtually the entire blob coloured the warm purples and reds of agreement. While it’s hard to pinpoint real divergence from this point of view, the strongest agreement appears to exist among Prospectors. This is consistent with our research with this aspirational group, who are often ambitious not just for themselves but for their children, seeing success and achievement as core motivations and arguably the mark of good parenting.
And finally this week, Charlie’s Attic, our mystical cavern of eternal youth:
