Call for other fundraising methods to follow PFRA's donor attrition research
Howard Lake | 21 March 2011 | News
For the fourth year running the Public Fundraising Regulatory Association (PFRA) is undertaking research for its Donor Attrition and Retention Survey (DARS). PFRA members are being invited to submit their data to help benchmark this method of fundraising and derive best practice.
Indeed, the PFRA, the self-regulatory organisation for face-to-face direct debit fundraising, is encouraging other groups in the fundraising sector to implement similar benchmarking methods.
PFRA’s vice chair Michael Naidu, assistant director of fundraising at PFRA charity member Mencap, said: “As a charity that has recruited regular donors through direct mail, DRTV, press ads and door drops, as well as F2F, it would be really useful to have the same kind of intelligence for other types of fundraising as I do for F2F.
“PFRA members are leading the fundraising sector in modelling donor attrition, and other methods of fundraising would do well to follow our lead. There is a level of attrition associated with every form of donor recruitment, and yet F2F is the only one which accurately reports – and shares widely – what these figures are.”
Last year 27 charities, just under a quarter of PFRA’s charity members, submitted data for DARS. This data covered campaigns that recruited 750,000 donors spanning 2006-2009, donating more than £68 million of regular giving income during that period. This year DARS co-organiser Rupert Tappin, Managing Director of PFRA member Future Fundraising, is aiming to increase participation to half the PFRA’s 98 charity members and more than a million donors.
Tappin explained the value of DARS: “To plan properly”, he said, “charities need to know how many donors will cancel and at what point in their giving history they are likely do so, in order to maximise the opportunities to retain them.”
PFRA member charities wishing to take part in the 2011 survey should contact PFRA’s head of communications Ian MacQuillin. The data supplied to DARS is anonymised: none of the researchers can see which charities are taking part.
The results of DARS 2011 will be announced in June, and will also be presented at the Institute of Fundraising National Convention in July.
DARS is currently being run in Spain too. Tappin added: “DARS is known as the benchmark for fundraising attrition in the world. We have had contact from many people from charities in countries worldwide requesting help in setting up their own versions of DARS and the survey we are now working on is Spain is the first of its kind”. He said that he’d like to be able to compile a global DARS covering street and door attrition levels around the world.
www.pfra.org.uk
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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.