A former GoGen employee has said that cold calling made up “very little” of the work that he and some 400 others were doing on behalf of charities at the time the agency collapsed.  

Speaking to Civil Society News, the former telephone fundraiser who worked for over four years at the now defunct agency, said that “cold calling accounted for very little” of his day-to-day work, and that GoGen callers were far more likely to be working on “donor development” campaigns.

“Cold calling accounted for very little, up until the end anyway. We did a lot more donor development and donor acquisition type stuff but, obviously, that varied from campaign to campaign.”

The telephone fundraiser, who was working at GoGen’s London office at the time the Daily Mail published its undercover expose, said that in his time with the agency he and his colleagues had noticed the public response to calls “hardening”.

“The targeted media coverage definitely increased awareness of – and, I guess, mistrust of - telephone fundraising. It definitely felt that the conversations were getting harder.

“At the end of the day though – if they’re telling you that they don’t want to be called – that was entirely reasonable as far as I and the company were concerned. Sometimes when that happened, a supervisor would come over and say ‘oh, why don’t you try something different,’ but it’d never be a malicious thing. It was something that got taken out of context in the Mail story.

“That wasn't a steadfast rule. You’d still contact people who wanted to – in spite of, or even because of – the media scrutiny, still donate to charity. Some people were maybe even friendlier, due to the media’s questioning of our practices, than perhaps they would have been before.”

Giuseppe Iantosca, former director of GoGen, spoke to Civil Society News a few days after the collapse of the agency and said also that cold calling amounted for “less than 10 per cent” of the work the agency did on a week by week basis. 

He added that: “I think it’s a popular misconception that agencies such as GoGen do lots of cold calling. Cold calling amounted for less than 10 per cent of the volume we were doing on a weekly basis.

“Within that specifically, the vast majority of that percentage of cold calls we were making were actually to sponsored data where someone had taken part in a lifestyle survey and expressed an interest in being contacted by that specific charity.”

 

• These interviews were conducted as part of an investigation into the state of the telephone fundraising landscape. The full piece will be available in the September edition of Fundraising Magazine. Subscribe here.