A big tick for face-to-face fundraising
Howard Lake | 5 July 2006 | Blogs
When he was interviewed in Third Sector a few weeks ago, Mick Aldridge, new head honcho of the Public Fundraising Regulatory Association (the face-to-face fundraising umbrella body), said he “dreamed of finding a blog in favour of face-to-face fundraising”.
Well, Mick, today is your lucky day.
I think face-to-face fundraising is great, as anyone who has read what I have written about it over the past five years will know. F2F brings in lots of new donors and raises loads of money. But the reason I have been so vocal in defending it is not so much that it is such a great way to fundraise, but that most of the arguments stacked against it are just so, well, crap.
I am pretty rational and these arguments just offend my sense of logic and rationality. F2F fundraisers get paid. So do all professional fundraisers, what’s so objectionable about paying some to fundraise on the street rather than from a comfortable West End office? F2F doesn’t break even until the first year or later (or, in Tabloid speak, “charities don’t receive a penny of your money for the first year”). Cold dm anyone?
F2F fundraisers ‘accost’ donors. Well they do, but only in the dictionary definition sense of to “approach, stop and speak to” and who can argue that that is a true description of what F2F fundraisers do. But ‘accost’ doesn’t mean ‘accost’ here; it is instead the bastardised pejorative colloquial form of ‘accost’ which many people take to mean ‘very-nearly-but-not-quite-harassment’. ‘Harass’ means to “trouble or annoy by repeated attacks, problems of questions”. This is a claim anti-chuggers rarely make because it is much easier to refute. Far better to equivocate with a fluid term like “accost”.
The reason I raise these points again is that negative media coverage regurgitating all these tired old arguments keeps surfacing and, because critical reasoning is not taught on the national curriculum, it’s tempting to think journalists with a skill for rhetoric might have a point. So it’s important – yet again – to take a close look at some of these ‘arguments’.
The latest such example comes from Times – it’s always the bloody Times isn’t it? – correspondent Caitlin Moran, a former music journalist*, who bemoans the start of the “chugger season” because chuggers (I use the term only so that Internet search engines will find this blog) can be “ruinous to a blithe summer mood”. Poor love.
Moran says that until this year she had thought that chuggers were “admirable volunteers”. The implication is that professional charity workers – yes, all professionals, not just fundraisers – are not admirable because they are paid. See, it’s sheer bloody nonsense.
She also lists all her friends’ favoured chugger put-downs, such as the guy who confronts NSPCC fundraisers with “Oh I don’t really like children”, which I find a little bit pathetic but probably makes him feel witty and clever (well, it impresses former music journalists). I suggest that next time he comes face-to-face with a direct dialogue fundraiser from the NSPCC, he says: “Actually I think little children deserve to have cigarettes stubbed out on their naked bodies” and reflect on how clever he feels after that.
I don’t understand the point of these anti-F2F op-ed pieces. They don’t present solutions, they are not constructive, they don’t look for a consensus and they are aimed at the small proportion of the British population who have a thing about chuggers. All they really do is present an opportunity for journalists to display their oh-so-clever opinions (ah, answered my own question there).
So what’s the way forward. Well, as I have said before – and as the PRFA has started to do and as I think will do much more of with Mick at the helm – fundraisers must not be afraid to get the F2F message out, quite vociferously if required. If you believe in something, you should be prepared to fight for it.
But there’s another way. The Fundraising Standards Board’s tick marque (it’s not a kitemark; mustn’t call it a kitemark!) is designed to sit unobtrusively on a member organisation’s fundraising materials.
But that doesn’t mean it has to be unobtrusive.
An F2F fundraiser’s tabard is fundraising material and therefore it can be adorned with the FSB’s marque. There’s nothing to stop it being displayed pretty big – emblazoned even. Fundraisers across the UK could be walking the high street with the FSB’s logo prominently displayed beneath the name of the charity.
The marque will be a reminder to every chugger-doubter, every time they see one, that F2F is regulated and conducted responsibly and appropriately. I think that seeing the regulator’s stamp – literally and figuratively – on face-to-face fundraising will force journalists to realise this, and to ask questions about F2F, rather than launch straight into prejudiced op-ed. Perhaps then they will stop writing the ill-informed rubbish so many of them currently do.
A prominent FSB logo would not only be an endorsement of F2F fundraising, it would also be wonderful ambient advertising for the Fundraising Standards Board, which is confronted now with the issue of promoting itself to the general public. Think how many people would see that logo every day on Oxford Street alone.
And F2F-displayed FSB logos should also lead to the public having greater confidence that chuggers are a properly-regulated part of mainstream fundraising.
Everyone’s a winner.
Except journalists such as Caitlin Moran, who will have to work a bit harder in their anti-fundraising tirades. But if she just wants to spout her opinion, there’s always music journalism.
Next time – all the thrills and spills of the Institute of Fundraising National Convention. If I really get my act together I’ll do a blog every night. Don’t hold your breath though.
*BTW in case you didn’t spot it, my describing Moran as a “music journalist” was rhetorical sleight of keyboard (an ad hominem argument) that attempted to imply that she was not qualified to speak on face-to-face fundraising because of her past career in the vacuous world of the music industry. It was therefore totally unjustifiable (easy to slip these little things in though, isn’t it?).
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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.