“Our donors are victims of fundraising processes,” Giles Pegram told delegates at the International Fundraising Congress in the Netherlands yesterday.
Speaking at a session called 'The answer to your retention problems', Pegram (pictured), a fundraising consultant and former appeals director at the NSPCC where he was responsible for the £250m Full Stop campaign, said charities were spending a fortune on acquisition, but not building relationships with donors.
He said fundraising was often seen as an activity that raises money so that an organisation can continue to do good work.
“It is a very bad model because it positions the fundraising as a beggar and the donor as a victim of marketing,” he said.
Pegram said fundraisers should start with the cause and the donors that want to give to that cause. “The job of fundraisers is to be the bridge, the link between the donors and the cause, but we get it wrong. We think about donors very little, we come to work thinking about fundraising activity not our donors, who are the victims of the fundraising process.”
Fundraisers analyse every activity, every mailing and piece of communication, and measure the response to judge success, he said, but this doesn’t consider the donor.
“We don’t think how is this building the relationship with the donor, how are we enhancing their experience,” he said. “Our way of saying ‘thank you’ is pretty unconvincing and many don’t say thank you at all.”
He highlighted work by Adrian Sargeant, professor of fundraising and marketing at Plymouth University, demonstrating the link between satisfaction and the quality of the relationship and marketing activity, and the future intentions of donors and their behaviour. A 10 per cent increase in donor loyalty can increase their lifetime value by 200 per cent, he has found.
Charlie Hulme, managing director of Donor Voice UK also spoke at the session. “Is retention that big a deal? We are losing people faster than we can replace them. When you look at the time spent on acquisition compared to retention, we are just not doing it. We are running to stand still. The sector has not seen significant growth in 40 years,” he said.
“Retention is everything we do. Everything we do impacts the way people think and feel about us.”
He said the cost of acquisition is going up while retention is falling.
Hulme said research by Donor Voice shows that highly committed donors are worth 105 per cent more in lifetime value.
“How they think and feel about the charity is going to determine how they are going to act,” he said.
Charities have to start measuring what donors think and feel about them, which is something the commercial world has been doing for years, he said.
