PFRA asks charities to share donor attrition/retention data for five years
Howard Lake | 12 January 2010 | News
The Public Fundraising Regulatory Association (PFRA), the self-regulatory organisation for face-to-face direct debit fundraising, is seeking 15 member charities who will commit to pooling their donor attrition and retention data for the next five years.
The PFRA’s annual F2F Donor Attrition and Retention Survey (DARS) is already claimed to be “the most robust and complete picture of donor attrition and retention across any fundraising method”. The creation of the core group is intended to make it even more robust and valuable.
The third annual round of DARS gets underway in March. Devised and researched by Morag Fleming, Head of Fundraising at Scottish social care charity Quarriers, and Future Fundraising managing director Rupert Tappin, its results will be published in June at a seminar following the PFRA’s AGM.
Fleming, who is also the convenor of PFRA Scotland, said: “Forty-four charities took part in the survey in 2008 and 2009, but only 10 of those participated in both years. That hasn’t affected the quality of the results because each time the total numbers of donors of the participating charities was well over a quarter of a million, so both years’ findings were extremely robust.
“But we now want to add another layer of robustness to the survey, which we can do by establishing a ‘core group’ of charities, including some of those doing the highest street and door volumes. With these charities on board, we can be totally confident that every year, DARS will reflect the biggest players in F2F fundraising and allow us to set an attrition benchmark that is unparalleled in the fundraising sector.”
So far five charities – Quarriers, EveryChild, Shelter, Epilepsy Action and Concern Universal – have agreed to be part of the DARS Core Group. Their data is anonymised so that not even the two researchers are aware of individual charities’ results.
Members of the DARS Core Group will receive a rebate on their annual membership registration fees after three years and, at the end of the five-year period, they will be rebated the next two years’ membership fees and receive a year’s free membership.
Charities interested in joining the DARS Core Group should contact Morag Fleming. Charities interested in taking part in the 2010 survey but not wishing to become a core member should contact PFRA’s head of communications Ian MacQuillin.
The third year of the PFRA’s DARS is likely to be the first with an international dimension, with involvement from Daryl Upsall of Daryl Upsall Consulting, an expert in the international use of F2F.
www.pfra.org.uk
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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.