Trying to get people to donate to charity by making them feel guilty just won’t work. If people give because they have been guilt-tripped, they are very likely to stop giving as soon as the cause of their feelings of guilt are removed.
But what is meant by ‘guilt’? The very act of asking for a charitable donation – in any situation, for any cause, via any fundraising medium – has the potential to make someone feel guilty if they decline to give.
The nature of a fundraising appeal is that a charity is asking you do something to improve the life of someone else and you have to decide whether or not to give. You could argue that it would be difficult to make any appeal to donate without inducing some pangs of guilt among those people who say no.
F2F fundraisers ought not ‘guilt trip’ people into giving by deliberately saying or doing things that would make them feel guilty or awkward about refusing to give.
Fundraisers must persuade people to give by presenting a compelling ‘case for support’. Anybody is at perfect liberty to – indeed, has a right to – decline to support a fundraising appeal for any reason without feeling guilty about it.
However, just because someone might feel a tinge of guilt about saying no to a fundraiser, that’s not necessarily because the fundraiser has guilt-tripped them. Some people do genuinely feel guilty about not giving.