Is in-house face-to-face fundraising experiencing a ‘management gap’?
Howard Lake | 19 May 2014 | News
Charities might not have sufficient management experience to run in-house face-to-face fundraising (‘F2F’) operations, an expert in the field has claimed.
Writing in a blog on his company’s website, Matt Monfared, of charity recruitment specialist Flow Caritas, said the demise of the big street agencies has also removed the proven training ground for F2F managers.
Matt Monfared
Charities have filled the filled the gaps left by the big agencies such as Gift and Dialogue Direct by setting up in-house teams – PFRA figures last year showed that nearly 60 per of donors recruited on the street were done so by in-house teams.
But this had has also created “more demand than ever before” for F2F managers.
“This has resulted in quicker progression into management for new fundraisers compared to five or 10 years ago and means we now have a sector with less experienced managers who are more spread out across the sector than before,” Monfared writes in his blog.
“It also means that where charities used to be able to outsource the day-to-day logistics of running a fundraising field force, they now have to take on this weighty task themselves. For some charities that are running in-house programs this can be a major challenge; some don’t have the necessary experience and some simply don’t have the time.
“As F2F moves from agency to in-house, we have a potential management gap, and we are going to have to bridge that gap if in-house F2F operations are going to be self-reliant and expansive.”
Monfared says that only the in-house operations run by Shelter and the British Red Cross have “close to matching the big agencies in terms of scale of operation”.
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.