# When was the last time you shook a collection bucket?

- Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/2021/03/18/when-was-the-last-time-you-shook-a-collection-bucket/
- Published: 2021-03-18T07:29:32+00:00
- Author: Samuel Davies

**One of my first memories as a twenty-something fundraiser was hefting a collection
bucket around Bestival, while dressed as a gorilla. A standard noughties activity
for any fundraiser back then.**

The bucket grew reassuringly heavy throughout the long, hot, summers day, as I wandered,
sweating, through the fields of chillin’ festival goers. Occasionally I’d spot another
gorilla doing the same thing, there were a dozen of us of different heights and 
strides, but with the same branded collection buckets.

At the end of each very hot day, I would combine the collections into one bucket
and store in a secure trailer. This went on for five days.

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By the end of the festival, the festival organisers asked us how much we had raised
and I was a little embarrassed that all those heavy buckets had only amounted to
just over £500 of coppers, 5p and 10p pieces in the main. This wasn’t inconsequential
for our small charity but also seemed, even back then, as a poor return for all 
of our volunteer work.

More successful than this was a group of very dedicated volunteers that I worked
with once, who organised systematic tube station collections and would regularly
raise over £1,000 in a day.

However, even throughout the noughties I witnessed the decline in success of this
form of fundraising. The volunteer group eventually stopped their regular collections,
I suspect in part because it just became too demoralising. The era of touch screens,
online banking, PayPal purchases at the touch of a finger on eBay and Amazon, are
a far cry from the world I knew a decade or two ago.

Even before Covid, I don’t recall seeing any change collections on my commute for
sometime. Those face-to-face fundraisers you do meet now often accept contactless
payments or are instead seeking a more committed regular donation relationship with
you.

I suspect the memory of coins and spare change is still a few years off of going
into a Peter Kay ‘do you remember’ routine, but perhaps we’ll see this in our lifetime.

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of brushing up on my knowledge of ‘contactless’
in a conversation that I had with Tap Simple founders **Tom Montague and Alexander
Coleridge**. This was an eye-opening [Charity Chat](https://www.charitychat.org.uk/),
and possibly a prediction for what will be if it isn’t already, the norm.

[Charity Chat podcast](https://soundcloud.com/charitychat) · [E71 – Contactless for Charity](https://soundcloud.com/charitychat/e71-contactless-for-charity)