Public dislikes paid donor recruiters, says Charity Monitor
Howard Lake | 12 October 2003 | News
Five times as many people dislike giving to paid donor recruiters as like giving to them, according to the two most recent surveys for Charity Monitor.
The public does give to paid donor recruiters on the street, but they don’t like doing it. This is the dilemma for fundraisers posted by Charity Monitor’s latest research.
Charity Monitor’s surveys in April and August 2003 show that about 6% of British adults choose signing up to a direct debit via a paid street or doorstep fundraiser as the first or second preference out of ten methods of giving to charity. As such, this method is more popular than making a bequest and just ahead of giving via Gift Aid or paying membership dues.
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However, more than 30% of adults surveyed said paid recruiters were their least favourite method of giving. This was the highest score of any method of giving. The next least popular mehtods were giving by bequest or membership subscriptions, each selected as least favourite by about 10% of adults.
Giving via paid recruiters was most popular among 25-34 year olds and ABC1s, and least popular among those over 65. Ironically, ABC1s and Es were also among those who most disliked giving to paid recruiters, as were 35-44 year olds.
The figures are based on 1,965 face-to-face interviews carried out in-home in April and August 2003. The paid recruiters option has only been included in the questionnaire for two surveys so far.
Charity Monitor was designed by Andrew Papworth for the RNLI in 1990 and has been running every four months since then. It collects spontaneous and total awareness data for about thirty major UK charities, together with likelihood to give and perceived effectiveness data, preferences in methods of helping charities, and newspaper readerships.
So, that leaves fundraisers with the dilemma: can you afford to drop a method of fundraising that generates income from many donors but which annoys many others?
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.