Fundraising must be a PR priority

Howard Lake | 15 November 2006 | Blogs

I was out drinking with some fundraiser mates a few weeks ago and a couple of people from the press office had come along too (well, it was a fundraising and communications department).
This was a charity that, when I was a journalist, hardly ever sent me a press release, let alone ever thought to contact me with a potential story. So I thought I’d take the chance to quiz them about it. The simple and stark answer was that ‘you just weren’t a priority’. So that told me didn’t it?
When I was a journalist in this sector, it never ceased to amaze me how many charity PR departments (often, but far from exclusively, at some of the bigger charities) couldn’t be bothered to give me the time of day. I can think of one charity in particular that just never returned any of my calls in five years. Others seemed to do it grudgingly. After all, they had big important service delivery and programmes to PR and promote. Or else they had a sexy celebrity photoshoot to organise. I mean, you don’t want to have to deal with the trade press when you could be doing that, especially not the fundraising trade press – the trade press for those horrid little salespeople in that murky office in the basement.
One of the most common complaints from fundraisers is that the rest of the charity sees them as something that is a bit grubby or a bit less noble than what they do. The trustees think that spending money on fundraising is deeply immoral. The finance director doesn’t want to know that you’ve put in place an acquisition programme that will deliver at 4:1 RoI in three years because that won’t help you hit your target now, this year! The DG couldn’t care less about fundraising. The service delivery and programme staff look at you with an air of complete disdain because you don’t go around saving things or making things better like they do.
And the same attitude prevails in many PR departments, where fundraising is way, way down the list of priorities.
[I happen to think that fundraisers contribute to this situation by the way they regard themselves and their profession but that’s a discussion for another time.]
But, you’re probably thinking, that charity PR I was drinking with meant that the charity trade media were not their priority – because they have the nationals and the consumer press and the broadcast media to worry about – not that what their own charity fundraisers did was not their priority.
However, how the PR departments regards the charity trade press is a barometer of how they view their fundraising department. If a charity’s PR team can’t be bothered (and consequently doesn’t know enough about fundraising) to engage with the charity sector press – think about it, this is the one sector of the press that is clamouring for good and interesting stories about your fundraising activities and people – how will they be able to speak with conviction and authority about the fundraising and fundraisers to other sectors of the press, many of which maybe won’t have such benign intentions as the charity press?
This argument was pretty much the core of a presentation I made last week (November 7) at the Institute of Fundraising’s PR and Communication one-day conference. Later on when I was sitting in the audience, I overhead a fundraiser behind me say: ‘All our PR team wants to do is service delivery; they just don’t care about us at all.’
Just because fundraising is not THE priority doesn’t mean it’s shouldn’t be A priority – and let’s face the truth that it is fundraising that isn’t the priority, not just the charity sector trade media. That fundraiser I overhead is not alone; lack of interest and buy-in from the comms department was one of the most regular moans I used to hear from fundraisers.
Fundraising needs good PR and it needs advocates. Fundraising suffers at the hands of the media. It comes under attack for using chuggers, the amount spent on the cause, fundraising scandals, more chuggers, chuggers again, fundraising costs, and to a less extent direct mail and challenge events.
Any charity PRs who do not understand the fundraising function and fundraising strategy, who do not accord the fundraising department a priority that it deserves and who do not support fundraisers in their many dealings with the media and the public are letting down their colleagues, their charity, their cause, and ultimately their beneficiaries.
We need a shift of attitude among charity communications departments. They have to start realising that, as the fundraising mantra goes, everyone is a fundraiser and fundraising is not the Cinderella department that you only get round to once the programmes and celebrity patrons have been PRed; but is an integrated and integral part of the organisation deserving of a proportional slice of the PR cake.
Fundraising needs good PR and there are none better placed to provide it than charity PRs. Sounds obvious when you put it like that.
 

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.