Survey launched to find benchmark for face-to-face donor attrition
Howard Lake | 1 May 2008 | News
The first survey of donor retention behaviour among charities that have undertaken street or door-to-door ‘face-to-face’ (F2F) donor recruitment campaigns has been launched.
Any charity that has undertaken street or door fundraising over the past 10 years is being invited to take part.
The survey is being launched with support from the Public Fundraising Regulatory Association (PFRA), the body which acts as the self-regulator throughout the UK for all forms of face-to-face fundraising. It addresses the subjects of attrition and best practice for donor retention from regular giving campaigns, and aims to produce a set of benchmarks relating to the retention levels of donors recruited by street or door fundraising.
The PFRA Attrition Survey 2008 has been devised and set up by Morag Fleming, Head of Fundraising at the charity Quarriers and Rupert Tappin, MD of professional fundraising organisation Future Fundraising.
Fleming said: “In our sector, attrition has been a hidden topic for a long time, and we really want to bring this out into the open.
“I often hear talk of industry averages when it comes to attrition, but nobody can actually refer to consistently measured statistics. We hope that the results from our survey will, for the first time, give the opportunity for individual charities to benchmark themselves against industry averages”.
The survey has been sent to every current charity member of the PFRA, and an online version has been created as a survey using SurveyMonkey, which can be accessed via the link given below.
“The aim of this survey is to give our members a robust management tool with which to predict their return on investment,” said Mick Aldridge, CEO of the PFRA. “Charities will then be able to go to market on a much more informed basis with respect to the long-term performance of well-planned acquisition campaigns”.
The survey should be completed by 23 May, and results are sent direct to Mick Aldridge at the PFRA who will then anonomise each survey response, and pass them on to Fleming and Tappin for analysis.
The idea for the survey was initially conceived, and built, by Rupert Tappin. “Without establishing a benchmarked set of data,” he said, “it is very hard for charities to identify trends in their regular giving programmes year-on-year, and makes it almost impossible to assess the impact of trialling new ideas and techniques. There is so much potential for charities to work in partnership with their providers/in-house departments once attrition has begun to be benchmarked, which could have a massive impact on enhancing income to charities over the long term”.
All organisations that take part in the survey will receive a copy of the summary report, to be produced by Fleming and Tappin early July 2008. They will present their findings at a ‘Focus On F2F’ seminar at the Institute of Fundraising National Convention on 7 July 2008. Each individual organisation can further request of Mick Aldridge, on a strictly confidential basis, their exact position within the anonomised, benchmarked data.
Any UK organisation wishing to take part should complete the online survey.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=vC949prQVrN7_2fMEXXkrbKA_3d_3d
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.