The guilt of 'no'
Mick Aldridge tackles some of the criticisms levelled at F2F fundraising and explains why it won’t ‘just go away’
“Face-to-face fundraising won’t last much longer. The market will soon become saturated. As more and more people sign up there will be fewer potential new donors. So the cost of recruiting a new donor will increase to a point where it no longer becomes cost effective.”
Obviously this is not my opinion. This was the view of a fundraising consultant (who shall remain nameless) in 2000 when asked for his predictions for the forthcoming decade. Every year someone predicts the demise of face-to-face fundraising (F2F). Only last month, a commentator opined that F2F “just won’t go away”. But why would it? And why should it?
People give to people
After all, it is the most successful individual donor acquisition method of the past 15 years; and in the last two completed financial years, Public Fundraising Regulatory Association (PFRA) members have recorded the two highest annual recruitment totals ever. In fact F2F is recession proof – Figure 1 shows that it has actually grown during this period. And we estimate about 18 per cent of all live regular donors have been recruited through some form of F2F, contributing at least £120m each year.
Why has F2F been so successful? Because it is the (literal) embodiment of one of fundraising’s basic maxims: that “people give to people”. Fundraisers know the best way to convey a charity’s case is to have a real live person deliver it. Talking to a representative of a charity about the work they do and how you, as a donor, can help them do it, carries far more persuasive urgency than reading a piece of direct mail or watching a DRTV advert, however skillfully and creatively they might have been constructed.
More importantly, F2F works well with people who don’t respond to other traditional or less personal forms of fundraising (indeed the received wisdom has long been that F2F is especially good at engaging ‘younger’ donors: and while this is clearly true, as Figure 2 suggests, I have always believed that what we are seeing is simply the effect of peer group attraction. Put simply, most street fundraisers are young people and they tend, quite naturally, to approach other youngish people like themselves who they reason it will be easier to communicate with. Whatever the psychology, it works. If you cannot send them a letter and make them come to you, you have to go out and find them.
In some ways it’s a little like fishing. The fundraiser stands on the street as a shoal of potential donors flows past; some of these will happily support your charity and are just waiting to be asked; but which ones? You just have to wait until one of them bites. But there are many, many people who will do. Over the last decade, F2F has successfully signed up an average of about 600,000 donors each year – about 5.2 million in total. F2F therefore proves a second fundamental maxim of fundraising: if you don’t ask, you don’t get.
But even when people flow past, and do not sign up, you are still giving your brand and mission valuable exposure. In fact at least two recent surveys of ‘reputation’ and ‘brand integrity’ show long-term F2F users dominating among their top 20’s. This is because F2F makes your organisation human and interpersonal: or, as I always say, people can see a given charity working in, with, and for, their own community.
The truth about ‘chuggers’
The regular predictions of the demise of F2F don’t come from people who really believe that F2F is in decline; they just wish it was. Without a doubt, F2F is a fundraising method that attracts a considerable amount of vocal criticism; but there is no clear correlation between the decibels of criticism and the quantity of criticism. Last year, FRSB members recorded just 312 complaints about street F2F and a little over 2,000 complaints about doorstep F2F. PFRA media monitoring only logs about a dozen mentions of the word ‘chugger’ on an average day, not all of which are negative in tone.
This is not suggestive of huge swathes of a totally disaffected public searching for places to vent their annoyance about F2F. It’s just that those who do comment – through Twitter, blogs, discussion forums, or by using their platform as journalists – do so very loudly indeed. But they are not, in any sense, representative of the ‘quantity’ of public opinion; as usual, the public just gets on with things: they don’t particularly like ‘chuggers’; but they don’t particularly dislike them either. Many critics, including fundraisers from other disciplines, actually object to F2F at a fairly ‘superficial’ level. For instance: they will object to the fact that “the fundraisers are paid and not volunteers”; or they complain that “too much” of the donation goes to paying off the ‘chugger’ agency; or that “too many donors drop off”; or that they “give when they choose to without having to be asked”. My favourite is “F2F is harming the reputation of charity in general”(!).
It is relatively simple to rebut such arguments because these criticisms actually apply to every type of fundraising, especially any type of fundraising that is outsourced in any degree to a third party agency. Virtually all fundraisers are paid and not volunteers. All fundraising, even that done by volunteers, has costs that must be covered before the charity is in ‘profit’. All fundraising has levels of attrition associated with it and we know that people don’t really give without being asked.
Nowhere to hide
I don’t think any of these superficial arguments really get to the core of why some people object to F2F at all. I think the crux of the matter is that F2F’s greatest strength is also, perversely, its greatest weakness. F2F gives the opportunity for a person to engage with a real live fundraiser and say “yes” to supporting a charity with a regular donation. But it also presents the person with the challenge of having to say “no”. I believe there’s a critical human factor at play here. Some people naturally feel guilty about saying “no”.
This certainly does not mean that they have been proactively ‘guilt-tripped’, which is a very different thing; just that the very act of deciding to say “no” to another human being makes them feel just a bit guilty. And the more they say “no”, the guiltier they feel. This shouldn’t be a surprise: it is basic human nature to do things which make us feel good, and to shy away from those things which make us feel bad; and saying “yes” to please someone is obviously ‘better’ than saying “no”. But rather than asking themselves why they feel guilty about not giving they hit out and attack the F2F fundraiser for making them feel that way. A classic case of shooting the messenger.
Of course, the accusation of ‘engendering guilt’ is true of all forms of fundraising, not just F2F. The crucial difference with F2F is that the ‘saying no’ is a much more personal experience. With most other forms of fundraising, people avoid these feelings of guilt simply by pretending they haven’t been asked in the first place. The unopened mail simply ‘drops’ into the waste-bin; the ignored DRTV just ‘get’s lost’ in idle channel-hopping; the spam-filter deals with it.
But of course you cannot avoid a real live fundraiser on the street or your doorstep. There’s no hiding from the fact that you have to make a decision. It might be a difficult decision, of course, but just because F2F fundraisers present people with difficult choices does not justify removing that form of fundraising just so people can have an easy life.
It’s OK to say ‘no’
So, again perversely, the challenge for F2F is to get beyond dealing with all the superficialities and grapple with the real question of how we empower people to just say “no” in an equal dialogue. F2F is not going away. If anything, it is going to grow and grow. Despite all the superficial arguments, people will always give to people. The challenge for the sector may be how to address the public’s deeper-seated feelings about it, but we can crack that. And when we do, the future of F2F will be secured.
Author: Mick Aldridge
Mick Aldridge is chief executive of the Public Fundraising Regulatory Association and has been a professional fundraiser since 1992.
He is a member of the Institute of Fundraising, fellow of the Institute of Direct Marketing and sits on the Fundraising Standards Board.
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