With Scottish charities feeling the pinch, some are taking lessons in cut-throat marketing techniques, discovers Kirsty Scott

NEWS that the UK's top charities have seen their biggest rise in donations for 10 years has rather a hollow ring in Scotland. New figures to be published shortly will show a drop in public donations north of the Border, and experts predict that unless Scottish organisations copy the sometimes cut-throat corporate approach adopted by their bigger counterparts, many will go under.

Only a handful of Scottish voluntary organisations made it on to the list of the top 500

fund-raising charities released yesterday by the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF). These lucky few - there are 300,000 recognised charities in the UK - earned a total of #4.4bn in the past financial year, up 11% on the previous year. The figures have been hailed as a sign the sector has overcome ''compassion fatigue'', the 1990s buzzword for supposed public ennui with a string of seemingly endless crises: Ethiopia, Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and now Sudan.

CAF attributes the rise to a more committed public, willing to set up direct debits and standing orders and knowledgeable about the tax benefits of regular donations. It also points to the increasingly businesslike approach adopted by many of the bigger voluntary organisations with fund-raising teams, marketing budgets, and

media savvy.

''This has been been the trend for the past 10 years,'' says CAF spokeswoman Vicki Pulman. ''Charities are having to become increasingly professional and market themselves as most companies would. There are 300,000 recognised charities in the UK. That is a vast market in which charities must raise awareness of their own issues. The advantage for the larger charities is they have more resources with which to fund-raise, and are also household names.''

Despite the competition, Pulman says CAF's research does not suggest the smaller charities are doing badly. Charity experts in Scotland, however, would beg to differ. In the next few weeks the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations (SCVO) will release figures showing a slight decline in public donations in Scotland.

''The bigger charities are getting bigger,'' says SCVO director Martin Sime, ''but the pot is not, so the small and medium-sized organisations are feeling the pinch - and all the Scottish charities are small and medium-sized.

''You have to spend money to raise money. The impact for Scottish charities will be quite severe. They'll have to invest to survive and few can manage that. Fund-raising is becoming an international business.''

Sime points out that one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Scottish market is that it has not become as cut-throat as the rest of the UK. ''Scotland has so far managed to avoid that; there's more of a sense of a collective identity here. It is less of a marketplace. The last government wanted us to compete with each other, but in Scotland more organisations are coming together rather than trying to compete with each other. Scottish charities have always been closer to government; we rely more heavily

on government income.''

WORKERS at the sharp end, however, say it is these very characteristics which are holding the Scottish sector back. It's estimated that many of the charities in Scotland are funded to the tune of 60% to 90% by urban aid and local authority grants.

''It is a funny market in Scotland, an old-fashioned fund-raising market,'' says Kate Caskie, depute director of Shelter, one of Scotland's most successful charities. ''It is so far behind London and a lot of charities

have lost a lot of their money from local government.

''I think Scottish charities have to get more professional - those which are doing professional things are doing all right. In Scotland there is this idea that we need to all work together. In London, the charities are climbing over each other, shafting each other to get the big corporate donations. But what happens in London happens in Scotland 10 years later.

''One of the nice things about the Scottish charitable sector is that there are so many small projects doing excellent work and it would be great if they could all survive and grow, but they're not going to. If you look to the future, an awful lot of small charities are going to go under. They are not going to get more money from local government or central government and they haven't the capacity to do their

own fundraising.''

The generosity of the

Scottish public, although

legendary, is not, she believes,

being utilised effectively.

''We need to stop thinking of fund-raising as a dirty word. Here, people throw their hands up in horror and say, 'That's advertising, that's private sector, we don't want to do that'. Fundraising may be a luxury, but people can't afford not

to do it.''

For the top UK charities, meanwhile, corporate culture may have become a way of life, but they insist they have not lost their sense of purpose.

''There has always been an element of competition for funding in the charities sector,'' says Simon Hodgson of Oxfam, ''but I think at the programme end there is less competition than there is at the fund-raising end. People make a choice of which charities they want to support but I think when it

comes to the delivery end, the work is divided up between different agencies.

''I'm not saying the voluntary sector is all lovey-dovey but it's a slightly different imperative that's driving us. We are not about making a profit. We are not competing to pay back to our shareholders. In a way, we're in competition for our supporters, but we know many of them support other charities as well.''