PFRA reveals redeveloped website
Howard Lake | 22 June 2010 | News
The Public Fundraising Regulatory Association (PFRA), the self-regulatory body for all types of Direct Debit face-to-face (F2F) fundraising, has presented its redeveloped website to its members at its AGM in London.
The site has been designed “to better reflect PFRA’s regulatory role as the bridge between charities and local authorities while at the same time being accessible to any members of the public who visit”.
Ian MacQuillin, PFRA’s head of communications, explained: “We have different stakeholder groups who have different expectations of what we should do for them. In the past, we tried to segregate visitors to the website according to who they were and where they’d come from.
“On the new website, we will be helping visitors navigate it according to what information they need from us, not who they are.”
The website has been produced by web design and development agency 9web.
As the PFRA is not a public-facing regulator, the website is not primarily intended for use by the public. However, one of PFRA’s roles is to champion and defend F2F, so the new content, based on 12 new key messages developed by PFRA, has been written in the expectation that members of the public will visit. The website features a prominent corner graphic asking ‘Object to ‘chuggers’?’ which links to a list of the most common assumptions and arguments against face to face fundraising, and the PFRA’s response to them.
Ian MacQuillin said: “F2F fundraisers – or ”chuggers’ as they are often called – rouse a lot of public interest so it’s very likely that members of the public will find our site. As PFRA is also tasked with promoting and defending F2F fundraising, we’ve taken this opportunity to try to engage with those people who object to ‘chuggers’ by presenting counter-arguments to the most common criticisms.”
The new website also marks a move in the PFRA’s use of the word ‘chugger’. The combination of ‘charity’ and ‘mugger’ was designed to be a pejorative term so the PFRA avoided using it. MacQuillin said: “We believe that a lot of the objections to ‘chuggers’ are based on a lack of real understanding of how street fundraising works. We want to use this new website to try to change that. But if we want people to engage with us and listen to our arguments, we’ve got to be speaking the same language as they do.”
www.pfra.org.uk
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.