Part 1: Fundraising is not for wimps
Howard Lake | 8 February 2010 | Blogs
At first, I felt dreadfully sorry for the fundraiser (as reported in Third Sector a few days ago) who was so upset by abusive phone calls from members of the public that she quit not just her job but left the whole charity sector. It’s not the first time that I’ve heard about a member of the public being so obnoxious that they’ve reduced a fundraiser to tears. In fact, it happened to someone I know just a couple of days ago.
I also know what it’s like to be on the wrong end of a public haranguing. Not only do I work in PR supporting chuggers in public, for which you have to have a pretty thick skin, but I was a Special Constable for six years in the 80s and 90s. I’ve been ignored, ridiculed, patronised, sworn at, jostled, and punched. And things weren’t much better when I was in the police either. I thank you!
Anyway, as I read on the story didn’t follow the angle I was expecting, and my sympathy for the lead actor began to dissipate. I thought that the story would be about how disgraceful it was that this poor girl had to suffer such a tirade. But the fundraiser – and this is where my sympathy for her evaporated – turned her distress and anger not on the people who verbally abused her but on her charity, and the charity sector as a whole, for sending out DM that leads people to complain.
Quoted in Third Sector, the she said: “Before I started this job I had no idea of the upset that we as a sector caused and now that I have, I am disgusted. We can’t call ourselves charities when we upset that many people.” She’s disgusted, you notice, not with people verbally abusing her and her colleagues, but with charities for leading them to behave in such a manner in the first place.
My first thought on this argument is what an insidious shifting of responsibility it represents…a member of the public may have behaved in a totally unforgivable, uncivilised and thuggish fashion that left me feeling wretched, but its not his fault, it’s mine for sending him a piece of direct mail that he didn’t like. It’s an example of how victims blame themselves for the crime perpetrated against them.
Third Sector doesn’t give the name of the charity this woman worked for, nor the cause (although it implies it was an animal charity), nor does it give any clue as to the nature of the DM that generated the complaints.
However, on a balance of probabilities argument, how bad can these pieces of DM have been? Can they have been so bad that ringing up a minion of the charity that sent them and abusing her until she cries was a justifiable response? How bad would a piece of charity DM have to be before you behaved like that? And once those complainants got off the phone from shouting at a fundraiser, did they feel better? Had they got it out of their systems? Did they feel they had behaved with propriety and done the right thing?
My second thought concerns this fundraiser’s apparent assumption – which sadly she shares with a number of others – that charities should not, under any circumstances, put members of the public in the position where they feel they might want to complain. To coin an aphorism, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. As an individuals fundraiser, you take your message into people’s personal spaces (either through the letterbox, over the phone, on TV, in their in-box or on the street or doorstep). You confront them with a wrong in the world and ask them if they will help you to redress that wrong. For all sorts of reasons (guilt, shame, taking offence, anger, dislike of the fundraising method, and plenty of others), some people might not be comfortable with you doing that. Some of them might complain about it. You can engage with those that do. Some of them might get aggressive and abusive. That’s their problem.
Charities try to change the world. To do that, they need money. If, in their quest to raise money to help alleviate suffering and pain, they make a considered decision to make a controversial statement, tackle a difficult subject, or use a graphic image, and this provokes a relatively small number of people to complain, then that has to be endured. In fact, it is probably unavoidable. Fundraisers’ primary duties are to their beneficiaries. If the greater number of donors and potential donors don’t complain, they cannot alter their fundraising policy to appease the vocal few who do.
Arguably, and it’s an argument I’d be prepared to make, if a charity DM campaign returned zero complaints, then there’s a good chance it wasn’t being made to work hard enough.
The lessons from this story are twofold.
The first is that it is totally outrageous and unforgivable that anyone should be subject to such abusive tirades from complainants. Should fundraisers ever encounter such uncivilised behaviour, they need not, like the fundraiser quoted in Third Sector, blame themselves.
The second is that fundraising is not for wimps. The difference between the subject of Third Sector’s news story and my acquaintance, the one who was verbally assaulted recently, is that she is still in her job. She’s got no intention of throwing in the towel.
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.