Time for all charities to defend face-to-face, says PFRA's Aldridge
Howard Lake | 30 September 2010 | News
Mick Aldridge, CEO of the Public Fundraising Regulatory Association (PFRA), has called on the charity sector and fundraisers to start standing up for face-to-face fundraising.
Speaking in London this afternoon at the Institute of Fundraising’s first Conference on face-to-face fundraising, Aldridge issued an open challenge to delegates: “will someone finally take up the mantle of “charity F2F champion”?” he asked. The PFRA has argued the case for this method of fundraising for over 10 years, but it is a regulator and not a trade association, so has to be careful to maintain a balance between championing the method and ensuring that its charity members comply with its code of practice.
It was time for charities to take a more robust approach to defending this method of fundraising, he argued. “It is you who will benefit from this methodology, it is you who must be prepared to justify, champion and defend your use of it should you ever be called upon to do so”, he said.
He added: “Because you will be”.
Newsnight ‘investigation’ into face-to-face
He pointed to BBC TV’s Newsnight programme last month on face to face as “the perfect opportunity for the sector to rally round and definitively, robustly and collectively defend its use of F2F fundraising”. This opportunity was, however, “squandered”, he said, because only one charity out of around 30 approached was willing publicly to support the approach on the programme.
He acknowledged that the Newsnight researchers were not willing or able to put F2F in context: “All they wanted to do was promote their own spin that charities should not pay agencies to carry out F2F. They were completely uncomprehending and indifferent to the fact, frequently repeated by me in the interview I gave, that all fundraising costs money…”
Yet despite the programme’s slant, “it was still an opportunity for the public to see a senior officer of a charity, senior fundraiser or chief executive, putting our side of the story, convincingly, for once” he suggested.
Charities’ brands will have more impact
“Hearing these arguments delivered by charities themselves will lend them far more weight and moral authority than the PFRA alone can ever give them”.
“Bottom line is”, Aldridge told the conference, “it is all your brands the fundraisers are out there wearing too – not the PFRA’s; not that of an individual PFO; not even just that of whichever charity is the target of that particular journo that particular day”.
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Tackling charity sector ‘naysayers’
Who does he believe should take up his challenge? The larger, trusted and respected charities that have benefited from this method for more than 10 years should be at the front of the queue. So too should those senior fundraisers and fundraising advisers whose reputation means other fundraisers look to them for inspiration and leadership.
Aldridge took to task those charities, fundraisers and fundraising consultants who publicly criticised F2F, and suggested charities were wrong to use the medium. While he welcomed constructive criticism of the method, he said “the level of – I can only really call it ‘slagging off’ – that F2F receives from some of our so-called colleagues from other fundraising disciplines is intolerable and we are calling time on it today”.
He criticised those digital and direct marketing fundraisers and agencies that sniped against F2F with tweets such as “it’s a shame there isn’t a TPS for ‘chuggers’”. He argued that “F2F is the most successful form of individual fundraising of the last decade”. It was transparent about its costs, and worked on a pay-per-donor basis, he told delegates, unlike methods such as direct mail, press advertising, and DRTV, all of which involved some “upfront fee irrespective of how successful the campaign ends up being.”
For those fundraisers from different disciplines who thought they could shirk the issue, or join in “the bear-baiting of highly visible F2F”, he warned: “it’s professional fundraising per se that the public doesn’t understand, and therefore doesn’t like…
“One day, the media will tire of F2F and they’ll come after another methodology instead”.
Opportunity for all types of fundraising
Aldridge ended his passionate address with a positive call to action. As charities face impending cuts from the government and all that those entail for levels of donations, while experiencing an increased demand for their services, the fundraising sector is presented with an excellent opportunity, in his view.
This was “to once and for all nail the lie that charity fundraising is waste not investment; to nail the lie that charity fundraisers are half-arsed amateurs deluded by fly-by-night agencies, rather than the competent professionals you are: to nail the lie that ‘charity’ still means ‘well-meaning but ineffective’ rather than efficient and impact-focussed.
“This is the time, right here, right now, when the fundraising community has to draw a line in the sand and say, with one voice – we are the cause: without us, not a penny is raised and not a jot is achieved”
He argued that we must respect our different methodologies, respect healthy diversity of opinion, respect informed debate about facts, around cost-per-acquisition, or retention; but “we will no longer tolerate lies, slander, misreporting or just sheer bloody lazy reporting”.
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.