Same as it ever was – fundraising and the media
Ian MacQuillin | 12 June 2015 | Blogs
Some people just don’t understand fundraising. They have no conception of different fundraising techniques. They have no grasp of admin or fundraising costs. They can’t get their heads around the fact that fundraising is something you have to pay professionals to do. And they think donating to charity is their decision and their decision alone, so any kind of ‘pressuring’ or ‘guilt tripping’ such as pens in mail packs of ‘chuggers’ are beyond the pale.
There are many like this. However, most of them don’t write totally uninformed garbage for the national, regional or local media.
I wrote these lines in March 2003 when I was the editor of Professional Fundraising (now Civil Society Fundraising). They could have been written yesterday.
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This was the introduction to an article on how the fundraising sector was responding (or rather not responding) to an unrelenting wave of media hostility.
In a blog last week looking at how charities are coping with the current tsunami of press attacks, JustGiving’s Jonathan Waddingham wrote of the press statements proffered by charities:
“They are all so weak, so bereft of power and so interchangeable it just makes the problem worse. To be fair, it’s not easy to fight back when you’re on the back foot, but as I read more and more carbon copy ‘defences’ from each charity I felt like they’d made the situation worse, not better.”
Lisa Clavering commented in her blog that charities were still using the approach to the media they used five years ago. In fact, it’s barely changed in 15 years. To support my case, I present a few quotes taken from that article published in the April 2003 edition of Professional Fundraising.
“Charities need to be much braver about how they handle their PR. The classic is negative publicity around fundraising and admin costs but fundraisers should be saying: of course we have costs, we couldn’t run without them. But there is a fear of the unknown. No-one knows what the reaction will be so the sector is too cautious.”
Alan Clayton
“Fundraisers have been their own worst enemy of the last few years. There has been a real culture of trying to show that our fundraising costs are as low as possible.”
Lindsay Boswell, then ceo of the Institute of Fundraising
“Even though it would be to fundraisers’ advantage to explain how and why they do what they do, people will think that any charity that starts doing this first will have something to hide, and they will be seen as the biggest villains.”
Joe Saxton
“The first step is greater understanding of fundraising at a governance and managerial level. What is needed is clearer communications between charities and supporters and the most effective way to get charities communicating better is through a greater degree of engagement in fundraising by the rest of the organisation.”
Lindsay Boswell, then ceo of the Institute of Fundraising
“Just who is the guardian of the fundraising sector’s image and what are they doing to get the message across? Whoever it is, not a great deal, it would seem.”
Ian MacQuillin
“I never see someone from a charity saying that arguments about chuggers are all very well, but we have 70 starving kids in a village in Africa to care for.”
The late Luke Fitzherbert, Directory of Social Change
And this is my concluding paragraph from that article, published 12 years and two months ago:
“For a sector that is grounded in commitment, fundraisers show remarkably little belief and commitment in themselves [when dealing with the media]. Until you can stand up and fight your corner with belief, confidence and passion, you will always have a problem with the way the public and media perceive you.”
Ian MacQuillin, when editor of Professional Fundraising, April 2003.
Plus ça change.
More from Ian MacQuillin
- Does fundraising need an ethics committee? (30 May 2014)
- Are you really proud to be a fundraiser? A new manifesto for fundraising (11 April 2014)
- Time we ditched fundraising’s personality cult (1 October 2015)
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About Ian MacQuillin
Ian MacQuillin is the founder and director of Rogare, the fundraising think tank at Plymouth University's Centre for Sustainable Philanthropy. He has worked in fundraising since 2001 as editor of Professional Fundraising (2001-2006), account director at TurnerPR (2006-2009) and head of communications at the Public Fundraising Regulatory Association (2009-2013).