Call for charities to take control over face-to-face attrition rates
Howard Lake | 25 September 2007 | News
Rupert Tappin, managing director of face-to-face fundraising agency Future Fundraising, is calling on charities to take more control over face-to-face attrition rates, set the benchmarks themselves, and establish a single unified attrition measurement system.
Speaking at tomorrow’s ‘Where Now for Face-to-face Fundraising’ conference in London, Tappin will urge charities to take more responsibility for driving down attrition and not leave it just to face-to-face fundraising firms.
Given that attrition rates are rising and the breakeven point for donors recruited on the street is therefore increasing, charities need to take a firmer grip quickly. As Tappin admits, most professional fundraising organisations do not have a financial incentive to reduce attrition rates.
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He says: “The problem is twofold. Payment systems often don’t encourage PFOs [Professional Fundraising Organisations] to minimise attrition because, beyond an initial period, they get still get paid even if the donor cancels their direct debit.
“And second, charities often rely on PFOs to supply them with the stats and figures associated with attrition rates so they have not enough control over this. But if charities can’t measure their own attrition and report this to PFOs, then PFOs will never be commercially motivated to deal with the issue effectively. If PFOs are left to set the parameters for attrition on their own, then attrition will continue to rise unchecked. PFOs will respond to this issue when raised fully by charities, and the competitiveness amongst PFOs will naturally see them develop systems to address this.”
He added: “Charities must drive this agenda. They need to ensure that they, not the PFO, set the benchmarks for attrition and ask their PFOs for more detailed information – such as showing which sites or individual fundraisers produce higher than average attrition levels – so that they can work with their PFO to monitor and adapt their tactics. There is a fine balance between productivity and long-term value (i.e. low attrition), and this can only be tackled effectively when charities and PFOs work constructively together.”
At the conference Tappin will be calling on the fundraising sector to adopt a single unified attrition measurement system, otherwise attrition will remain difficult to reduce across the board.
He said that attrition means different things to different organisations. “It is usually measured by the numbers of people cancelling each month”, he explained, “but should they be grouped by the month that the cancellations came in, or by the month of donor sign-up? Both will yield wildly varying rates of early attrition figures.
“Another key factor in attrition reporting is the time period: 40 per cent attrition after six months is not the same as 40 per cent attrition after a year – in fact it’s a lot worse.
The entire F2F sector should adopt a common definition and measurement of attrition so that charities can easily benchmark their own attrition rates against other, similar charities and a set of industry averages, appropriate to their specific cause.”
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.