The Children’s Society is expecting to have in-house face-to-face fundraisers on the streets of London at the beginning of April in order to circumvent a lack of capacity in the market and bring new technologies into its relationship with donors sooner.

The charity which has a long history of face-to-face fundraising has been working on getting the new team and PFRA accreditation in place for the last three to four months, and is hoping to get one or two teams working on a pilot in the capital for the Spring.

The charity will continue its relationships with commercial face-to-face suppliers, at least for the interim. Director of direct marketing at the Society, Henry Rowlings, emphasised that it has had a positive relationship with its face-to-face fundraising suppliers and that the move to in-house was in no way a criticism of the work they have done together.

‘Paperless experience’

The charity intends to recruit straight on to iPads and expects to be able to email or SMS a new donor “almost at the point of recruitment”. It is working on ensuring that system is integrated with its internal CRM system in order to provide better supporter journeys for new sign-ups.

“It feels quite anachronistic to be working from paper in this day and age. We would like signing up to be a 95 per cent paperless experience,” said Rowlings.

He added that using technology at the point of sign up sets donor expectations of a relationship which will be conducted via online means.

Rowlings said that while capacity in the market and the desire to introduce technology into the process sooner were the main drivers, the charity feels that taking face-to-face in house will have a third, important benefit.

“It will help us be able to test messaging more quickly,” Rowlings told civilsociety.co.uk. “Should something in the next six months become a hot topic of conversation among the general public, with this model we’d be able to test a relevant pitch on the street more quickly and get more direct feedback. We could still do that with the agency model, but it would take longer.

“Also we want to imbue the fundraisers with a real sense of belonging to the charity. In terms of motivation of fundraisers, we’d hope that, with them only working on our charity pitch, they would know more about the organisation and therefore it could lead to lower attrition levels down the line.”

Initially the in-house team will work on street fundraising alone, but Children’s Society may consider expanding it in the future to cover PSMS and door-to-door if successful.