fivemack | How inefficient is it to give to telephone or door-to-door fundraisers?

How inefficient is it to give to telephone or door-to-door fundraisers?

Someone phoned me 'from {name inaudible} on behalf of Christian Aid' this evening, and informed me that there were many orphans in Zambia as a result of the HIV epidemic, that the cost of sending one of them to school was £86 a year, and that it might be nice to give Christian Aid seven pounds a month to this aim.

My naive assumption is that the right answer is 'yes, that would be nice, I'll send Christian Aid a cheque for n*£86, n depending on how rich I'm feeling, at Christmas', on the grounds that a telephone fundraiser might well take a cut of any donations to cover their running costs; does anyone know how much of my seven pounds a month would actually get to Christian Aid?

(I have a fiver-a-month standing order on behalf of a charity working for blind people, which I made as a result of a door-to-door fund-raiser, and I fear there's a rather larger cut being taken out of that; I should probably kill the standing order and make one directly to the charity)

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I know this is duplicating what other people have said, but: ignore for the moment whether or not it's a good cause and think about whether or not it's a good method of raising/giving money.

My answer to that is: definitely not. If someone is "calling on behalf of" a charity that means they're not working directly for the charity. It means the charity is outsourcing its dirty work to save costs. And the dirty work in question involves cold-calling your home, which in my view is completely unacceptable anyway.

I have a massive problem with the argument that "charities need to make/save as much money as possible because they want as much money as possible to go to good causes". It's just a thinly disguised version of the capitalist argument that all "efficiencies" are good. What happens is that a charity thinking along those lines will outsource a lot of its fundraising to the cheapest/most effective company. And of course the cheapest/most effective company will treat its staff like absolute s***. And it will be as aggressive in its fundraising as it can legally be.It will have to, in order to be "efficient" enough to get the contract from the charity.

As for your question about the cut being taken, the experience of the people I know who've done this is that the fundraiser you spoke to won't get any cut of the money you donate. They usually get a flat rate per hour. It's certainly possible that management get incentives for harrying staff into raising more money, but I think it's unlikely that the telemarketer himself will see any relationship between the amount they raise for the charity and the amount they get paid.

So, as far as I'm concerned, this isn't about efficiency. This is about ethics. Do you want to encourage charities to outsource their work to call centres that treat staff like crap? Do you want to encourage more charities to cold-call you at home? Could you handle it if Christian Aid subsequently sold your details on to ten more charities and they all started phoning you at home as well?

When I get a telemarketing call, my strategy is always just to say "Perhaps in other circumstances I would buy/donate, but I don't want to do anything to encourage cold-calling, so I'm afraid the answer is no this time."

Charities are bound by the Freedom of information act just like anyone else and actually most reputable charities abide by the law. They are not allowed to pass details to anyone else without your consent. The law has changed in the last years so that everyone is automatically viewed as not giving consent and you have to be asked to 'opt in'.

I know Oxfam review 'chuggers' methods and after seeing that if actually resulted in a huge 'lapse' rate (people who leave too early) stopped using them for asking for donations in the street.

We switched to the 'I'm In' campaign on the street in 2006 where we asked people to 'choose they way they wanted to end poverty' and asked them if we could take their details and send them further info with a list of choices - of course that included the option of donating but it was a much softer ask.

I never agreed with using call centres while I was at Oxfam and I know they stopped cold calling for much the same reasons. They still did 'warm calling' to current donors. Can't speak for other charities of course.

It looks I'm out of date on the information laws. I was a fundraising/admin/tea-making volunteer for Oxfam in Wales about thirteen years ago and I remember then that Oxfam made a point of never selling details on but a lot of charities were notorious for making money out of selling lists. Then of course you had the FOI Act and the whole "If you do not wish to unsubscribe, please fail to neglect to untick this box" business.

I think "warm calling" is fine in principle, and I've done it myself, but I do have a big problem with outsourcing that kind of thing no matter how much money it saves the charity.

I'll do a post on my own blog about why I have a problem with chuggers rather than cluttering up

fivemack's LJ.

P.S. Your post about digital poverty was really interesting. Thanks for sharing it.

Oops, forgot to close the inverted commas. I meant

fivemack, of course.

"I'll do a post on my own blog about why I have a problem with chuggers rather than cluttering up"

Oo - shall read with interest. I'm a professional fundraiser and I don't actually agree with chuggers - I think it buggers up people's brands.

Your post about digital poverty was really interesting. Thanks for sharing it.

Thanks! If you ever come across anything that is happening in that field, i'd be very interested to know.

"I'll do a post on my own blog about why I have a problem with chuggers"

Have now done this here.

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How inefficient is it to give to telephone or door-to-door fundraisers?

Don't do it!

Re: Don't do it!

Re: Don't do it!

Re: Don't do it!

Re: Don't do it!

Re: Don't do it!