Opinion

F2F fundraising needs to get its priorities straight

Fundraising | Rupert Tappin | 21 Dec 2009

The sector needs to set priorities in face-to-face fundraising, but it doesn’t mean prioritising one set of donors above another, says Rupert Tappin

After ten years of development of face-to-face fundraising, the sector is starting to focus more on measuring longer term income. Perhaps the economic climate has accelerated this, as the performance of acquisitions channels improve, response rates and attrition levels have changed.

This balancing of acquisition and retention has to be a sign of maturity in the sector and should be celebrated. But I can’t help feeling that we are not quite prioritising in the right area.

With the development of the PFRA’s annual attrition survey, which compares regular givers based on actual payments made to their charities, we have a great opportunity to begin to better understand the behaviour of regular giving donors, and hence their true lifetime value to charities. However, it is incredibly important that we take a measured approach to testing which variables have a significant effect on attrition, which will vary hugely from charity to charity.

I wholeheartedly agree with the calls last spring from Unicef International’s Owen Watkins and consultant Daryl Upsall for increased testing in face-to-face. Now that we have a robust benchmark for attrition I hope this process can be begun by charities in earnest.

However, I feel that their other recommendation to target ‘Felicity Donor’ - women in their late thirties - is the wrong approach.

On the grounds of practicality, this profile of donor is hard to recruit through face-to-face. Targeting such a narrow profile is exceptionally difficult, so risks driving up cost per acquisition beyond the limit of viability.

In terms of productivity: it is important that as a sector we balance out what our databases tell us are the ‘ideal’ long-term donors, with the profile of donors that are actually responsive to the acquisition medium being used. One charity recently reported that running a face-to-face campaign that barred under-25s from signing up was not viable, as so few donors were being signed up that the teams became de-motivated, and productivity nosedived.

Now before you cry ’well he’s from an agency so would say that, wouldn’t he?’, I would be the first to agree that agencies should not be given free reign to recruit whoever they so choose. The ‘low hanging fruit’ tend to be younger donors, who have a higher propensity to cancel.

But it is all about balance. Charities and agencies have to continue to work better in partnership with each other. Charities need to hold agencies more accountable for the long-term quality of the donors that are delivered, perhaps by starting to report out actual payments - a departure from business as usual, but possible.

Agencies with the ability to scrutinise every aspect of a fundraising campaign, and access to the financial status of payments from each donor every month, can readjust their fundraising strategies very quickly. If the supporter profile looks unbalanced we can alter it.

However I feel that our wider role as fundraisers is to involve the whole community in fundraising, not simply target one group at the expense of others. We can communicate authentically with donors in the most appropriate way, and make it easier for them to engage with the charity that most closely suits their motivation for giving in the first place.

A relationship started face-to-face has a real chance of continuing online and offline, for years to come. It is not a factor of life stage or geo-demographic profile, but our will to make it happen.

We should be focusing on how Felicity might have looked ten or 15 years ago; who are the Felicitys of the future that we’ll be falling over ourselves to be recruiting in ten years time?

I see the smart money being spent by charities and agencies on starting to answer these questions now, through robust testing, and acquiring and cultivating today the right balance of donors that will become tomorrow’s lifetime value staples.

Rupert Tappin is managing director of Future Fundraising Ltd and chief executive of both Fundraising Recruitment Ltd and Fundraising Academy Ltd 

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