Opinion

Old dogs still have the best tricks

Fundraising | 1 Jul 2007

Junior fundraisers are being given far too much responsibility, which is having a negative impact on the quality of charity communications, says Mark Phillips.

As a child in RE classes I felt sorry for the Israelites who were forced to make bricks without any straw, but I still had concerns about the pharaoh who gave the order in the first place. I wondered why anyone would want buildings that were made from sub-standard bricks. I couldn’t understand why he would do it as he was only hurting himself in the long run – the buildings wouldn’t last so long, there would be extra reconstruction costs to pay and the builder’s time would be taken up fixing things rather than building a few more self-aggrandising pyramids.

As I walked home swinging my satchel, I comforted myself that we lived in the more enlightened times of the 70’s. We only had three-day weeks, power cuts and potato shortages to deal with. But over the last decade I’ve wondered if the spirit of that pharaoh has escaped his mummified body and is now getting his kicks by possessing the bodies of junior fundraisers who work at some important charities.

I’m thinking of the person who once told me that the house style didn’t allow for fundraising letters to use any bolding, underlining or pull-outs. Or maybe it was the person who instructed us to use only formal English as heard at the country’s finest public schools. Or was it the person who thought that including a PS was being far too vulgar?

It makes no real difference who it was. What was important is that personal prejudices were allowed to get in the way of raising money. Any fundraiser who knows their stuff will tell you that as soon as you ignore the needs of the donor you allow the donor to ignore you. And sometimes, just sometimes, junior fundraisers need this point emphasised by senior colleagues.

It’s hard when you start out in this industry. I cringe when I think back at some of the things I said at creative presentations in my first year of work and I apologise whole-heartedly to the combined staff of my first agency, the long departed Yellowhammer Direct, for every single one of them.

But luckily I had a good boss who kept a close eye on me and what I was doing. It is very much down to the time given to me by Chris Roles, now chief executive of Y-Care international, that I am doing the job I am now. He read and commented on every single round of copy before it was allowed to go back to the agency and he weeded out a great deal of my ‘helpful comments’ – teaching me as he did so about the rudiments of why people give and what could make a good DM appeal a great one.

And it is this supervision I think is sometimes missing. Pressure of work means that the development of copy is often delegated to junior staff with very limited experience of fundraising. I don’t doubt their good intentions, but all too often we see a whole raft of unnecessary changes that, in my humble opinion, weaken appeals and generate pointless additional costs.

And I find all of this particularly worrying in the context of everyone’s concern for the value of charity brands. Because surely appeals represent the most important manifestation of a charity’s brand to its most important audience – the people who give the money?

We’d all do well to remember there are plenty of proven ways to get people to read and engage with our messages – and not all of them are grammatically correct. And let’s all try to devote a little more time to helping less-experienced staff learn from our mistakes. It might make us cringe to remember the time we said ‘well I wouldn’t give to it’ – but it’s a valuable lesson to pass on!

Mark Phillips is managing director and creative director at Bluefrog

PS You read this bit, didn’t you? Even if you got bored half way through...

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