PFRA administers or helps administer 70 diaries in four separate systems by which PFRA members are allocated fundraising sites throughout the UK:
- London Site Management (1 - although in effect this is a 'super-diary' covering all of London)
- National Site Diaries (39)
- Affiliate Diaries (20)
- Council-run diaries (10)
London Site Management (LSM)
London has the most fundraising capacity and so has the most complex allocation system.
Allocations to Greater London’s 133 designated fundraising sites are run on a four-week basis. Charities all bid for space by informing the PFRA of the number of fundraisers they will have working during this period – the number of ‘recruiter days’.
For example if a charity expects to use 20 fundraisers working five days a week and five staff working two days a week, then over a standard four-week period, they would need to make a bid for an allocation of (20 x 5 x 4) + (5 x 2 x 4) = 440 recruiter days.
All the recruiter day requests are added up so each request can be expressed as a percentage of total requests. Five per cent of this capacity is reserved for the pool so that all the participants’ percentages are calculated on 95 per cent of the total bid allocation, rather than 100 per cent.
Of the 133 sites, there are 24 Grade A, 56 Grade B and 53 Grade C, graded according to the number of recruiter days they allow per week:
Grade A – 16 or more recruiter days
Grade B – 10-15 recruiter days
Grade C – 9 or fewer recruiter days.
Charities/agencies are randomly assigned a percentage of A, B and C sites according to their recruiter day bids. For example, if the bid for 440 recruiter days amounted to five per cent of the total recruiter day bids for this period, the charity would receive five per cent of the A sites five per cent of the B sites and five per cent of the C sites.
A Sites are those sites that can sustain the most fundraising activity. They are usually main central or suburban streets with a high footfall, often with a large shopping centre. They include:
- Tottenham Court Road
- Wimbledon
- Camden Market
- Borough High Street
- Hounslow East
B Sites include:
- Haymarket
- Great Portland Street
- Kings Road
- Carnaby Street
- Twickenham
- Walthamstow
C Sites are generally in more depressed areas or they are just quite small. They include:
- Peckham
- Lambeth North
- Bankside
- Highgate Village
- Walworth Road
Five per cent of capacity is reserved for the pool. This is meant for new entrants to street fundraising so they can try it out or for smaller organisations that don’t do it that often so they can have fair access and don’t have to go through the LSM bidding procedure. But other providers can go into the pool to top up their allocations – a provider can request five visits to pool sites each week but can’t request to go more than once to the same pool site.
National Site Diaries
The PFRA runs several other diaries for other cities and towns where street fundraisers operate but they are far less complicated because most have far fewer sites available. Nottingham for instance, has just six sites, but two of these are hardly ever used.
Every four weeks, providers send their requests for the different sites on the different National Site Diaries. PFRA’s Allocations Officer adds all these to the diaries but, as sites are not randomly assigned as they are in London, charities bid for their preferred sites, and this inevitably leads to clashes.
The diaries are published and then the providers resolve these clashes themselves through swaps and horse trading. The PFRA secretariat rarely needs to become involved in sorting these out.
Affiliate Diaries
Access for some towns and cities is not handled directly by the PFRA. For places such as Bath (four sites) and Bristol (20 sites) the providers who want to go there sort these out among themselves. A variety of methods have evolved and they all seem to work very amicably. For instance, for Bristol, the provider operations managers all get round a table to choose the sites they want.
Council-run diaries
Some councils choose to run their own diaries, with PFRA members reporting their planned activity directly to the council.