How should we defend face-to-face fundraising?
During my recent break from blogging, I've been keeping an eye on the debate about face-to-face fundraising.
It's been quite a saga.
It was obviously all kicked off by the piece on BBC's Newsnight. If you missed it, you can watch it here.
The central story was that charities pay professional face-to-face companies to recruit regular givers, paying up to £136 for each new donor they sign-up.
Newsnight questioned whether this was a good use of funds, citing industry figures that show more than 50% of people recruited in this way cancel their direct debit in the first year.
With the average annual value of a donor standing at about £90, their view was it seemed as though most of a donor's gift was going to the professional companies – not to fund the core work of the charity.
It appears from reading the PFRA response that it wasn't the most even handed piece of journalism…
'A Newsnight researcher revealed his real agenda when he told the PFRA: “I think if people knew how much it costs charities to recruit them then they wouldn’t sign up [via an F2F fundraiser].” We believe that the journalists working on this story set out from the start explicitly to persuade people not to donate via F2F because of the allegedly ‘prohibitive’ costs. Of course that argument could only be maintained by systematically ignoring the costs of other forms of fundraising, some of which work out at far greater per donor than F2F, and by ignoring the return on investment that F2F generates (often over 1:3). Essentially their agenda was not to ‘inform’ the public but to convince them of the ‘truth’ of their own personal – and false – prejudices.'
But stitch up or not, the sector doesn't seem to have handled this story particularly well.
When the BBC asked charities how much they spend to recruit a new face to face donor, only two responded – Cancer Research UK who pay £112 a head and the British Heart Foundation who pay £136. Newsnight informed us that other charities cited 'commercial confidentiality' as the reason for their reluctance to respond.
And though they were asked, charity CEOs weren't up for defending face-to-face on the show. Mark Astarita, Director of Fundraising for the British Red Cross, explained why …
'Newsnight wanted to set us up in a head-to-head situation with a small charity that hates face-to-face,” Astarita said. “It would have been a David and Goliath-type battle which nobody would have won. It would have been damaging to the whole sector and so everybody made a wise judgement not to play that horrible game."
“You could tell by the way they structured all the questions that they had an agenda – it was not an ‘investigation’, they wanted to make their story stick.”
In the end, Newsnight was unable to find charities to take part and so at the last minute decided simply to interview a charity that uses face-to-face. That was when the BHF agreed to take part, Astarita said.
He added that if Newsnight had proposed a straight interview from the outset, he expected charities would have been queuing up to defend the practice." '
The trouble is, whether we like it or not, it's the media channels that set the agenda and if we don't respond intelligently, we'll all be worse off.
A recent survey by the Charity Commission has shown that over the last two years, 11% of people have lost trust in charities, with media coverage about charities and how they spend their donations seemingly driving this change in attitude.
Which is why I was disapointed to read about the debate at the recent IOF conference on face-to-face fundraising, where PFRA CEO, Mick Aldridge summed up the sector's reluctance to defend face-to-face fundraising…
'Aldridge's attack wasn’t limited to the sector’s reluctance to defend face-to-face, but also centred on the “intolerable and hypocritical… ‘slagging off’ that face-to-face receives from some of our so-called colleagues from other fundraising disciplines”.
“That is rank hypocrisy and it has to stop,” he said. He noted that direct mail recruitment costs “are many orders of magnitude higher than for face-to-face” and challenged advocates of that medium, and others such as digital, to publish figures on RoI and costs for general viewing.'
It seems that the PFRA is concentrating on defending face-to-face on cost – because it recruits donors more cost-effectively than press or direct mail it should own the moral high ground. That's fine if the debate is within the charity sector. But as we know, it's a little wider than that.
Mick has also pointed out that we need a champion to defend the technique. And he's right, but I'd go one step further. We are one sector and we all succeed or fail together. We need every single charity in the land to commit to champion fundraising in all its forms. Because, as it is now, it's quite obvious that few donors fully appreciate the impact of their response to our fundraising messages.
A series of nfpSynergy studies has found that donors think that just 25 pence in every pound they donate actually goes to fund actual 'work'. The perception is that the majority of their gifts are used to cover administration and fundraising costs.
And it's people like Rarry Revan, who comments on another piece in Civil Society, who suggests a blindingly obvious way that we can tackle this misconception…
'Get a beneficiary out there, maybe a cancer survivor who said without face to face I wouldn't be alive. Or an African doctor who learnt their trade because of donors who were signed up on the doorstep.'
By taking this approach we shift the debate from how we raise money to the impact of how we spend it. And every single charity in the land can help achieve this goal. It's not about big advertising campaigns either. We'll win this argument on the micro-level.
Take Care International for example. They have shown that the attrition rate of face-to-face can be halved by providing donors with personalised, high quality feedback on how their donations have been used.
And ActionAid generates response rates to thank you feedback packs that many charities would love to get from their actual appeals.
The fact that a significant percentage of people find face-to-face recruiters irritating is just one symptom of a wider problem. We have to remember that people complain about DM, telephone fundraising and even online advertising too. Donors simply aren't linking their gifts to any measurable outcome. And we are verging on stupid if we continue to ignore the desire amongst donors to know what difference their gifts have made.
People pay for value and if, after a great face-to-face recruitment process, you find yourself on the receiving end of a stream of self-congratulatory newsletters and appeals for more money it's not surprising that you might feel a bit short-changed.
The moral high ground on this matter is well within our grasp, but it won't be gained through an internal debate about relative costs nor through interviews on Money Box or Newsnight.
Instead we should confront criticism through aggressively demonstrating the benefits of our work.
By doing so, we'll ensure that the amazing goals we are striving for – cures for disease, the eradication of poverty and the end of cruelty and injustice – are worth the inconvenience of a smile and invitation for a quick chat from a nice fundraiser on a street corner.
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As ever, Mark, a well argued piece, for which, thanks. I’ve been watching this debate with interest. Clearly, the original Newsnight package had an agenda. But I think we’ve got to get away from the rhetoric of megaphone diplomacy. This isn’t about a ‘stab in the back’ as Mick describes it, neither can it be addressed by ‘aggressively’ demonstrating the value of what we do. Rather, the sector has a bit of a tendency to stick its ‘foot in its mouth’. We’ve not made, in a compelling and attitude changing way, the reasonable case that all fundraising costs money and that it’s an investment, not a cost. And we’ve not shown that admin costs which include proper analysis, evaluation and impact reporting are a vital factor in attracting and retaining engaged donors.
I’d suggest these are the priorities rather than getting overly fixated on F2F.
Richard
Great post, Mark. I agree wholeheartedly with what you, and Craig, suggest – that the emotional argument is key in getting away from the one-sided focus on costs.
The other point that really needs to be made is that most people don’t generally give because they just wake up in the morning feeling compelled to make a positive difference. In almost every case, with the exception of personal experience, they give because they were asked. One of the big issues here is that most people – who have no professional experience of fundraising, which includes the media – have a strong, instinctive believe that people donate of their own volition and that charities really needn’t spend money asking, through any medium.
Richard is right, the argument has to be made, and proven, for investment in fundraising across the board, not just in F2F. This has to be balanced between the rational and the emotional to be really effective – very much like good fundraising. If official sector bodies don’t put a transparent and compelling counter argument forward soon, this kind of scrutiny, and public ‘decrease in trust and confidence’, will only increase. In this information age, where people can do so much of their own research online, there will be many more misinformed conclusions otherwise, and much more damage done to perceptions of charities and giving over the longer term.
Thank you, Mark, for expanding the debate about F2F. This is exactly the kind of discussion we hoped would develop out of this.
However, I would like to clarify two small points. PFRA is not suggesting that F2F should own the ‘moral high ground’ because its cost-per-donor would seem to be lower than for some other forms of donor acquisition. We fully understand that charities will need to use different forms of fundraising to reach different demographics and lowest cost won’t always be the deciding factor in choosing which methods to go with.
And PFRA has not decided to concentrate on a defence of F2F in terms of its cost. We are only doing that now because Newsnight decided to attack F2F on cost grounds.
Our point is that all fundraising has a cost and not only is it unfair to single out F2F in this regard, without putting it in the context of how much charities have to pay for donor recruitment, it’s also extremely unfair – hypocritical, in fact – for fundraisers using other types of fundraising to criticise F2F on cost grounds when their fundraising also has a cost, which might well be higher than for F2F.
The reason the debate about fundraising costs/investment overall appears to be ‘fixated’ on F2F is that F2F is the ground on which this battle is being fought. While we are out there trying to defend the cost of/investment in fundraising, other fundraisers from other disciplines are at best keeping their heads down so the media spotlight doesn’t come their way and at worst wading in with attacks of their own.
If the sector as a whole – not just PFRA or charities using F2F – cannot or will not justify the money it spends on F2F recruitment, and F2F disappears, then the media will find another target. Eventually, they will begin to question the costs of challenge events, or the money spent on online affiliate marketing, or the response rates of direct mail. They probably won’t be justified in doing so. But that won’t stop them doing it.