The annual face-to-face fundraising donor attrition benchmark, DARS, is the only  one of its type in fundraising. But is it independent and is it doing what it says on the tin? DARS authors Rupert Tappin and Morag Fleming explain why they back it.

After criticism of the Donor Attrition and Retention Survey at the Public Fundraising Regulatory Association's annual meeting this summer, civilsociety.co.uk asked both sides to make their case for whether the survey is robust and involves any conflict of interest. Read the opposing view here.

DARS was devised and developed by Morag Fleming and I back in 2007. At the time, the face-to-face industry was driven by the cost-per-recruit almost to the detriment of anything else. Attrition was measured, but not in any consistent or meaningful way, and was rarely published. Morag and I shared a vision that if regular giving from individuals was to become more accountable and transparent, we had to find a way that focused on measuring actual charitable income. We approached the PFRA to promote the survey, encourage participation, and to collate and anonymise all responses. For the first few years Morag and I worked on processing and analysing all the data, and working for a charity (at the time) and an agency respectively, anonymising of the data by the PFRA helped avoid any accusations of bias.

Over the past six years, DARS has seen a steady increase in the number of charities taking part – this year 34 charities submitted data from over 200 campaigns, reporting payments from almost 1.5 million individual regular giving donors. To the best of our knowledge, there is nothing else anywhere in the world that so robustly reports on over £200m-worth of banked income from individuals.

In more recent years, we have worked on improving the accountability and independence of DARS with the PFRA, commissioning Dr Carolyn Steward, a freelance researcher, to quality control every submission, and where relevant flag up discrepancies with the charity’s previous year’s submission. Carolyn also now deals with all the data, and produces the majority of the graphs, on which we report. Further, Professor Adrian Sargeant has been commissioned to analyse two of the six DARS surveys to date, and his insights have helped the sector to begin to understand some of the key variables that can drive retention.

The annual participation of almost one-third of the active PFRA charity membership allows us to produce insight which is impossible for a charity to do on its own individual data, however, the one thing that will increase the robustness of the entire survey is driving up charity participation. Over 75 different charities have taken part at least once, but we need them to take part year-on-year to ensure consistent results.

No conflict of interest

We believe there is absolutely no question of any conflict of interest in reporting on DARS – nothing has been raised over the past six years. Since then, Morag and I have invested over 2,000 hours of our own time, in order to create a robust benchmark that reflects the reality and longer-term performance of today’s principle regular giving acquisition channel. All insights that we make, if not based on Adrian Sargeant’s more detailed analysis, are qualified opinions of our own based on conducting this survey over the past six years. We have consistently stressed that organisations should never take just one of the key variables presented as being a driver in DARS, and then make strategic decisions based on this alone. Charities are urged to look at their own data, identify their own trends, and see where they may tie in with DARS; to suggest that charities make snap decision based on one data set would be foolish.

Ultimately, the future development of the PFRA DARS survey needs to be determined by the PFRA members themselves. The attendance at the DARS presentation at the annual AGM demonstrate that the level of interest in DARS is exceptionally high. Converting this interest into more organisations consistently taking part will allow for a more robust survey, which will in turn help each and every one of us – be they charity or agency side – better understand what drives donor retention, and hence raise more money for our charitable causes.

Rupert Tappin and Morag Fleming (pictured) are directors of Decaid.