CLIC Sargent uses face-to-face for first time
Howard Lake | 1 July 2007 | News
Children’s cancer charity CLIC Sargent has begun its first combined street fundraising campaign to broaden its donorbase. It is using teams of face-to-face (F2F) street and door-to-door (D2D) fundraisers in Bristol and the south west, and London and the south east, to attract younger donors in particular.
The charity is using professional fundraising company Future Fundraising to handle the campaigns, which began in May (F2F) and June (D2D), with the aim of recruiting 1,750 new donors through F2F by October and a further 1,250 through D2D by November.
CLIC Sargent reports early successes with average gifts more than £2 above the target ask of £8 a month and the attrition at the first payment period “below what was expected”. There has even been one direct debit of £100 a month.
Advertisement
Matthew Hunt, CLIC Sargent’s head of marketing, said the charity’s trustees had had some “full and frank” discussions about the use of F2F, but ultimately were “extremely supportive and encouraging” in authorising the campaign, part of a five-year fundraising strategy put together by Hunt.
We made the financial and fundraising cases to our trustees that we needed to diversify our current fundraising channels and to widen our donor demographic. Face-to-face and door-to-door were a key part of this strategy as they would also give us 100% direct donors,” he added.
Hunt also said that the charity had put measures in place to help identify any concerns that might arise with this method of fundraising and to communicate these to the trustees.
He said that close collaboration with Future Fundraising and ensuring detailed input into the training of the fundraisers has resulted in positive feedback from follow-up phone calls to new donors. These have cinldued former cancer sufferers and people whose relatives have experienced cancer. “These are the people that we might expect to be most sensitive to this method of fundraising,” said Hunt, “but we feel we are really reaching them through using street fundraisers.”
Future Fundraising’s managing director Rupert Tappin said: “If you take time and care to deliver quality at the front, you’ll get quality out at the end.”
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.