What do we want? The rise of the campaigning-fundraising charity 2

In a world long past there were campaigning charities and there were service delivery charities, and never the twain did meet. But in our brave new world, more and more charities are making campaigning a central part of their mission and messaging. Celina Ribeiro looks at what is behind the trend and what it means for fundraising

Last year marked the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of twentieth century divisions based on fear and thinking. A turning point in the way the governments and people of the world deal with and understand each other.

Two decades on, the charity world is witnessing some shaking along its own iron curtain. The ideological, emotional, operational and often physical separations between fundraising and campaigning are crumbling all around us.

As more and more charities abandon the traditional distinction between campaigning and fundraising, civil society organisations’ own internal cold war could well be coming to an end. But does this new Third Way work for all charities? Or is it a case of adapt or lose relevance in a modern supporter-driven world?

The earthquake in Haiti last month marked a step change in the relationship between fundraising and campaigning. Within 24 hours of the quake hitting the long-impoverished country the Disasters Emergency Committee launched an appeal for donations. Millions of pounds flooded in, and continue to do so. It was a straightforward natural disaster: earthquake hits, mass devastation occurs, aid agencies and armies fly in to right the wrongs of Mother Nature.

But this disaster, unlike the 2005 tsunami before it, prompted a different response from some charities.

Eight days after news started coming in about the disaster, Christian Aid – a member of the DEC – kicked off a campaign to drop Haiti’s national debt. A few days later Oxfam piped in with its own drop the debt campaign. Dropping Haitian debt has become an international campaign.

Christian Aid pledged to use its online petition to lobby the UK’s representative at the International Monetary Fund, Chancellor Alistair Darling, to cancel Haiti’s $890m national debt so as to free up the country as it embarks on the road to recovery. Five days after launching the petition, Christian Aid had more than 3,700 signatures – and their associated names and email addresses.

After signing, petitioners were sent an email with six possible further actions. Supporters could donate to Christian Aid or the DEC, take more campaigning action and become a fan of Christian Aid on Facebook.

Oxfam, meanwhile, had petitioners send a pre-written email to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the IMF, with a similar debt cancellation message. Oxfam took supporters’ email addresses and postcodes. Once you signed Oxfam’s petition, you were sent to a page where you could relay your action to your Facebook friends and Twitter followers.

The answer to the question ‘What can I do about it?’ whispered from couches into TV news broadcasts of Haiti’s starving, injured and displaced was no longer simple. Supporters could do a lot for the people of Haiti – and without even typing in their credit card details.

“The idea that somehow an NGO should just meekly patch people up and send them on their way without saying ‘why is this happening and how can it be stopped?’ would have virtually zero public support,” says nfpSynergy’s Joe Saxton.  

Trend towards campaigning-fundraising integration

This rise of campaigning has not gone unnoticed, nor uncriticised. Last December Spectator magazine published a scathing editorial from Ed Howker who blasted charities for losing track by campaigning.

Indeed, there has been a spate of charities heeding the call to campaign. In November RNID announced a massive restructure which would merge fundraising and advocacy and do away with a single director of fundraising post. Charities such as Cancer Research’s UK ask supporters to pledge support for campaigns and Unicef UK just this month has launched its first ever integrated multimedia fundraising/campaigning effort. 

Christian Aid too moved campaigning under its fundraising department just last month.

Director of fundraising at Christian Aid, and vocal critic of ‘cynical’ campaigning Ruth Ruderham says that there is a great public appetite for campaigning, but fears the impact on the sector of “charities who’ve got nothing to do with campaigning really just shoving it in”.

Christian Aid, says Ruderham, has a history of campaigning on issues such as the Jubilee Debt campaign and fair trade. However, the integrated Haiti fundraising and campaigning appeal may be an early indication of how the charity is scaling up its campaigning activity, coming as it did immediately after the charity’s restructure.

“You don’t just have to do campaigning and keep it separate from fundraising,” she says. “That’s how we used to operate: ‘campaigners are campaigners, they’ll never give money – and people who give money will never take campaign action’. We do need to take an integrated approach.”

“We have just agreed that to be able to treat supporters holistically, as people rather than by two different departments, we are going to have to have an integrated approach. So within fundraising we have a supporter engagement team who will recruit, develop and retain all supporters – both campaigners and donors.”

While Ruderham says this approach will mean that people who sign a petition will likely be asked for a donation, she argues that charities who seek lead generation disguised as campaigning jeopardise the trust of supporters and faith in the sector as a whole.

“If we treat this badly we do run the risk of killing this new public enthusiasm for campaigning, killing this new way people want to engage. People don’t just want to give money, they want to take action if they think we can affect change,” she says. “We run the risk of making people sick of that. In the way that we saturated face-to-face and now we’re paying for that as charities with attrition rates, we run the risk of over-saturating this as well if we all just jump on the bandwagon with no genuine thinking behind it.”

The lure of campaigning, reckons Stephanie Pfeil, director of fundraising at War on Want, may have something to do with fundraising bottom lines. “A lot of the traditional recruitment channels don’t seem to be functioning as well as they used to. Obviously it’s a very crowded market and I think that having a database where you have a lot of campaigning contacts is a very attractive option for many charities,” she says.

Donors are demanding it too, she adds. “It makes them feel more part of it, gives them a bit more ownership versus being a more passive supporter.”

“The internal division of campaigns versus fundraising is not perceived in that way at all by supporters. They just see a fundraising or campaigning ask as just another ask. They might not choose to do it and they most certainly want to be respected if they say don’t mail them,” she says.

And while all those speaking to Fundraising agree that demographics are playing a role – that younger people want to ‘feel part of something’ – Pfeil says that older donors too are engaged ith the idea of contributing to change through campaigning.  

“The consensus from across all sorts of demographics [researched by War on Want] was that ‘I have no problem with you asking me, it is just another thing I may or may not do for you’.”

Strong results for integrated asks

Following a long integration process, all mailings from War on Want are a coordinated affair.

“All campaign materials have a fundraising ask,” says Pfeil. “The fundraising ask will vary depending on the kind of campaign material we are sending out.”

Pfeil cautions that charities may “misunderstand” what kind of contact campaigners are. Campaigners are not simply on a journey to becoming a donor, she argues that charities must acknowledge that there will be some supporters who will only ever campaign. That, however, hasn’t stopped War on Want from trying.

“We found that when our appeals combine both a campaigning message and a fundraising ask, our results are really, really strong,” she says. “Having a campaigning ask hasn’t – for our database -  impacted badly at all on our response rates. Actually over the last year our response rates have gone up. We’re ahead of target in our appeals.

“So the proof is everywhere.”

The proof was no more apparent than in Save the Children’s Gaza ceasefire appeal early last year.

As Israel launched military action against Gaza, the DEC once again responded with an urgent humanitarian fundraising appeal.

Save the Children accepted donations also, but in the meantime ran a series of press advertisements asking supporters to text the word ‘ceasefire’ to a digital petition that the charity pledged it would take to Downing Street to call for the UK to put pressure on Israel and Hamas to end the conflict. 182,000 people sent in their details. Ruderham describes the charity’s reaction to the crisis as “phenomenal”.

“That was the first time I’ve ever seen a humanitarian agency respond to a humanitarian action with a campaign action, rather than a ‘give money’,” she says.

Joe Barrell, director of campaigns at Save the Children, says that conversion rates on fundraising calls made to the petitioners was “high”. “In terms of conversion it was significantly higher than anything any of us could remember,” he says.

“As a fundraiser it was very effective in terms of return on investment, even considering the cost of the initial activity. Clearly we had tapped into something and found a constituency who obviously felt very strongly about the issue and how wanted to support us via other means. We’ve recruited a very large number of regular givers through that route who are now committed supporters, not only through campaigning but through donations as well.”

According to Pell & Bales, which conducted the follow up telemarketing campaign for Save the Children, the follow up campaign aimed to get 5 per cent conversion for a regular giving gift, with a total annual value of £60. “Results came in considerably above target, with RoI 100 per cent up on target,” a statement from the company reveals.

Barrell says that Save the Children also has a little acknowledged and proud history of campaigning. “In our recent-ish history perhaps we have been doing a little less of it, but in the last four or five years we’ve really been returning to our campaigning traditions and really trying to get out there and speak out for children,” he says.

“That’s the direction most of our activity is going. We’re seeing more and more an integrated journey for people where we’re treating them as supporters and giving them much more choice and control over how they support us. It’s much more fulfilling for them and deepens the relationship.”

A win-win, but not for all

“If fundraising teams are suddenly saying ‘oh, we can work more closely with the campaigning/ communications teams because that’s a good way to get new supporters, that’s a win-win,” says Saxton.

However, Saxton cautions that not all charities will be winning. “There will definitely be some charities which find it doesn’t work for them. That will partly depend on the type of charity and partly depend on the call to action on campaigning. Some organisations that don’t have a good call to action on campaigning will be left slightly empty-handed,” he says.

“The rule that applies to fundraising applies to campaigning: the more specific the request to give money and the more specific the request to take part in campaigning, the more likely you are to get success.”

All of those speaking to Fundraising believe that charities will be increasingly taking on campaigning as integrated with their fundraising communications in the future, as charities evolve and react to changing donor perceptions.

But for many charities, the process of integration itself is a difficult one.

As a small charity, War on Want avoided the restructures that some larger organisations have undergone, but instead improved coordination with the appointment of dedicated staff in the different teams. “We’re sort of living in each others’ pockets,” laughs Pfeil. “But three or four years ago it was two silos, completely, working completely separate from each other.”

“It took us a while to get to the stage where we are today… It certainly was very problematic because internally we had to overcome a lot of hurdles,” she says.

“Most campaigns departments are very protective of their contacts – and rightly so. A lot of campaign departments feel that fundraising isn’t the right ask to ask the kind of contacts that they have, and that wading in with a money ask would scare everyone off. All their hard-earned campaigners would run for the hills!”

But coordination does not mean the fundraisers and campaigners simply sit around the water cooler singing kumbaya. “If you have teams competing for the attention of your supporters there will always be tension. But I think it’s a healthy tension. It helps you make better decision,” says Pfeil.  

“In this climate, that’s our lifeline.”

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What do we want? The rise of the campaigning-fundraising charity

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Organisation: Cancer Research UK (CRUK) | Christian Aid | Save the Children
People: Joe Saxton | Ruth Ruderham