Face-to-face is no longer an effective form of fundraising anywhere in the world, according to one of the two top fundraisers at Sightsavers.
Speaking in an interview with Fundraising Magazine, Becki Jupp, director of global giving and marketing at Sightsavers, said her organisation has chosen to focus its fundraising efforts predominantly in direct TV, as “face-to-face fundraising doesn’t really work anywhere anymore”.
Speaking about her organisation's most successful fundraising channels in overseas territories, Jupp said: “TV is the channel we most regularly recruit our givers through. It works very well for us. We don’t do any other regular giving recruitment, because the only other real channel for that would be face-to-face and what we’ve been seeing is that face-to-face doesn’t really work anywhere anymore.
Jupp said that much of the problem with face-to-face fundraising is that the fundraisers themselves “are very young” which means they tend to sign up a younger demographic of donors, which itself leads to very high attrition rates.
“Fundraisers are signing up people, but the attrition rates are awful. The fundraisers are very young, so they’re attracting very young people to sign up. So it’s like what we were going through with face-to-face fundraising in the UK a couple of years ago and trying to get them to attract an older demographic.“
Fundraising techniques overseas ‘largely very similar’ to UK
Jupp also told Fundraising Magazine that fundraising techniques overseas are “largely very similar” to those used in the UK. Where the key difference comes is in cultural differences amongst the public.
In Fundraising Magazine
“I would say that the fundraising techniques are largely very similar. I am quite surprised really that people respond to the same creatives and same emotional hooks overseas as they do in the UK," she said.
“So, for example, we use the same TV adverts in Sweden, Norway, Ireland and India. The difference is among how people prefer to give.”
Fundraising Magazine subscribers can read the full interview with Becki Jupp here.
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