Age Concern's Heyday is a warning to all charities

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re: Age Concern's Heyday is a warning to all charities

Leon Kreitzman — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 21:26:56 GMT

AARP in the USA began in the immediate post-war years and its main proposition was that it could obtain a deal on health insurance. This attracted schoolteachers of the time and so it had an upscale bias from the start.

This key proposition enabled it to gain critical size and it added its other activities on as it went.

It is a creatire of the uniqwue set of circumstances of its foundation and it has always been questionable as to whether it could be replicated in other countries. There have been several attempts at an over-50 activity in this country, and all have failed except SAGA which grew in a serendipitous fashion and has never been a membership organisation.

I am chair of an Age Concern and I told the leadership of Age Concern, in public back in 2003, that its conception was badly flawed. The execution was even worse, if that was possible.

I am afraid that the comments above are typical of the naive thinking that predominated in Age Concern England and the reason why it lost such a huge sum of charitable money.

re: Age Concern's Heyday is a warning to all charities

CHRIS BARRACLOUGH — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 17:33:50 GMT

I think you make a very good point. There was no compelling reason to join. But AARP seems to have a clearer proposition. Age Concern seemed to be lumping 50 year olds into the 'close to retirement' pot. And many people today do not want to retire. Even in their 60s.

re: Age Concern's Heyday is a warning to all charities

Tod Norman — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 10:26:46 GMT

Chris

Having had some involvement in the very intial stages of what became Heyday ( I worked on some intial thinking back around the ruen of the century) I have to be a little careful in what I say - I'm not sure what I can legally mention. But I will say this: AC has a a commercial arm - Age concern Enterprises - for many years, which generated significant funds for the charity by selling products ( particualrly financial ). Moreover, AC had a significant roll in campaigning: lobbying government to eliminate the age discrimination that is rampant in the UK ( c.f. this week's Dispatches report, narrated by - with a dellicious irony - Moira Stewart. So an organisation of 5 million members would have been a fantatstic tool to both negotiate low cost products for this age group, and to force goverment into creating and enforcing anti discrimination laws.

If you look to the States, you' see that one of the the largest membership organisations there is the AARP - the American Association of Retired People. Last time Iooked - and that was quite a while ago - they had 35 million members and were a highly effective lobbying and campaigning organisation. But they got to that size because they had a 'killer ap' - the could provide prescription drugs at a small fraction of the cost of normal pharmaceutical outlets. Joining the AARP could save the average Amercian over 50 hundreds of dollars a month on presecribed Statins, blood pressure drugs, anti arthritis medications, etc etc. Heyday did not offer the same powerful benefit.

Heyday, in my opnion, didn't fail beause of 'age led targeting', as per one artcile in the press, nor, I suspect, because it didn't have the ability to run a membership organisation. It failed because there was no poweful benefit, and thus no reason to join.