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Institute drops Astarita as keynote speaker at payroll giving conference 8

Fundraising | Tania Mason | 24 Jun 2011

The Institute of Fundraising has dumped its own chair, Mark Astarita, as keynote speaker at its Payroll Giving conference at the Home Office next week after he publicly derided the existing delivery of the fundraising technique in a media interview.

Astarita, the British Red Cross fundraising director who was appointed chair of the Institute just six weeks ago, was quoted as saying that payroll giving “hasn’t worked” and that “the only people who really love it are those who make loads of money from managing the transactions”.

“If government and others bleat on about payroll giving over the next few weeks, I'll scream,” he added.

Astarita was due to deliver the opening plenary at the Institute’s Payroll Giving Conference on Monday, to be hosted by the Home Office in Marsham Street, central London.  He was to speak just before Justine Greening MP, the Economic Secretary to the Treasury.

In recent weeks the government has thrown its weight behind payroll giving, expressing support for it in the Giving White Paper and announcing that it plans to launch a year-long national campaign in the autumn to promote the donation method to employers.

This morning the Institute confirmed to civilsociety.co.uk that Astarita had been removed from the programme and will be replaced by Institute trustee Tanya Steele, fundraising director at Save the Children.  

An Institute spokeswoman said: “Given Mark Astarita’s recently-publicised views on payroll giving the Institute felt that it would be more conducive to the conference’s success if someone who has not been associated with such strong positions were to speak.”

Astarita said that the conference host, the Home Office, had nothing to do with the decision. “We just decided we didn’t want to wind people up, but it certainly wasn’t the government’s decision,” he said.

A 'great fan of payroll giving'

He said the comments attributed to him earlier in the week did not tell the full story about his views on payroll giving. “I’m a great fan of payroll giving,” he said. “The British Red Cross pretty much invented payroll giving, we raised what in today’s money would be about £2bn from the penny-a-week fund which was the forerunner to payroll giving. I chaired the second-biggest payroll giving consortium in the UK. I think payroll giving is a fantastic model, and I would have been saying all those things to the conference.”

The decision was made to put Steele forward as keynote speaker because the Institute wanted to “calm things down”, Astarita said. “People get very excited and there are an awful lot of vested interests. But behind the scenes we need to work at getting some common sense behind payroll giving. It needs reform and reform is what we’re asking for.”

He said Tanya Steele would be delivering a similar speech to the one he had prepared, “only far more eloquently and without the rough edges. But she and I think exactly the same about payroll giving.”

“The Institute's position is very clear, we love it to bits but it ain’t going to work as it is at the moment. And I don’t think you’ll find many directors of fundraising that will say much different.”

The Red Cross has just been announced as one of the launch partners for a new online payroll giving service. Big Change, set up by company CCWorks, enables charities to set up their own payroll giving web pages in order to promote and process payroll giving via their corporate partners.

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Directory: British Red Cross | Institute of Fundraising | Save the Children
Who's Who: Tanya Steele | Mark Astarita