Entertainment

Study: Celebs Work To Promote Charities Fairly Useless

Rachel Stoltzfoos Staff Reporter
Font Size:

Celebrities often benefit more in terms of public image than the charities they promote, a British study says.

About 2,000 people were asked in the study to link any celebrity with a list of seven charity and aid organizations, including the Red Cross and Amnesty International, the Belfast Telegraph reports. Two thirds could not link a single celebrity with any of the organizations.

Professors working on the study told the Belfast Telegraph that although major non-govermental organizations are well-known, their celebrity advocates are not. “[M]ost people supported the charities that they supported because of personal connections in their lives and families which made these causes important, not because of the celebrities,” Professor Dan Brockington, of the University of Manchester, and Professor Spencer Henson, of the University of Sussex, said.

“Regardless of what celebrities may want in terms of publicity – and the interviews suggest that many would seek to maximise the attention given to their cause and not to them – it is clear that the celebrity can often do better out of this attention than their causes.”

Follow Rachel on Twitter