Community Foundation for Manchester won’t be using face-to-face fundraising
Howard Lake | 1 May 2012 | News
The Community Foundation of Manchester is the latest charity to poke fun at face-to-face fundraising as it indicates that it would not use this method for its Forever Manchester campaign.
Its humorous video presents Manchester’s Market Street as filled with irritating street fundraisers, mostly carrying out face-to-face fundraising, but there is also a traditional collector with a bucket.
The full video then goes on to suggest that that the Foundation is different and relevant to Mancunians. Note however that the closing fundraising image is of a coin being put into a traditional collecting box.
Its welcome email message says “we wanted to show you exactly what our charity is about . . . and also what it isn’t.”
The Community Foundation is not alone. Quite a few charities and fundraising companies publicly criticise face-to-face fundraising. Some argue that it is not appropriate for them, while others suggest that charities are wrong to use this method of fundraising. Very few other fundraising methods are treated this way by charity sector organisations, even those that generate considerably higher numbers of complaints from the public.
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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.