Bluefrog’s Head of Social Fundraising, Anna Walsh, has recently started her own blog – Social Frog – with a specific focus on street and door to door fundraising.

Her first post highlights a phenomena which she has named the Bergstrom Effect.

As Anna explains, It’s based on an episode from The Simpsons:

“Lisa Simpson’s teacher (Mrs. Hoover) is taken ill and substituted with the weird and wonderful Mr. Bergstrom (a fine, fine performance from Dustin Hoffman). Lisa is all of a sudden exposed to inspiring, tailored teaching, which takes into account her learning style, what she thinks and what she feels. This is a revelation to Lisa and, for possibly the first time, she gets a look at what her potential is and who she’d like to be; a peek at that thing that sits at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy – self-actualization.

Not surprisingly, when Mr. Bergstrom’s substituting is done, Lisa finds it hard to return to the way she had been working with Mrs. Hoover. She is disillusioned with, and disengaged from, school. Heartbroken, in fact.

I’m calling this the Bergstrom Effect.”

It’s a phenomena demonstrated by street and door to door fundraising techniques. For the thousands of people who haven’t been turned on by traditional (Mrs Hoover style) fundraising methods, the tailored and personal approach of being recruited by a real person who you can relate to is the equivalent of having Mr. Bergstrom turn up in your class.

Her concern is what happens after Mrs Hoover returns in the guise of newsletters, magazines or even in the disinterest demonstrated by the absence of any communications at all.

As Anna points out, we keep talking about the face to face demographic “attritting” just like Mrs Hoover complains about trying to teach Bart, but what would happen if we could keep Mr. Bergstrom in the relationship?

It’s a problem that she has been working on for the last six or seven months and, as she says on her blog “we’re on the verge” of a revolution with the imminent launch of a way to tackle theBergstrom Effect amongst street and door to door recruits.

Check out Anna’s blog for the full story.