27/08/10
The PFRA is extremely disappointed with the stance adopted by Newsnight for its recent piece on face-to-face fundraising. Frankly we had expected more from a programme previously held up as a bastion of balance and credibility.
PFRA is particularly dismayed that the BBC’s flagship news and current affairs programme should have set out from the start to deliver a ‘bad news’ item about this most successful form of fundraising and appears to have made an editorial decision to discount information about the costs of other forms of fundraising that would have set the costs of face-to-face fundraising (F2F) in a constructive context.
Newsnight contacted PFRA on numerous occasions, including filing an extended interview at our offices. We tried to be as helpful and open as possible, providing information on matters such as retention rates, total sign-ups and the solicitation statement. We also attempted to put F2F properly into the context of all available fundraising techniques.
Newsnight’s researchers only asked us about the costs of signing up donors through F2F. We explained that all types of fundraising campaigns have a cost and a break-even point at which the charity has recouped all the money that it invested in finding new donors. We explained this was the case for direct mail, TV adverts, web and digital fundraising, and even for fielding volunteers!
Newsnights’s researchers were only interested in the costs of F2F.
On more than one occasion Newsnight’s researchers mooted to PFRA that it was ‘wrong’ – at some sort of fundamental ‘moral’ level – that third party fundraising companies should be paid by charities to conduct F2F fundraising and they should make a profit out of it. We pointed out that charities habitually contract professional fundraising agencies to carry out all their fundraising activities, including not just F2F but also direct mail, TV and press advertising, online fundraising, telephone fundraising and the management of capital appeals, and that these companies, by definition, make a profit. We pointed out that a proportion of the money raised from these campaigns would always go the professional agency, just as it does in F2F. Indeed, charities pay profit making companies for a range of goods and services (utilities, stationary, etc etc) just as everyone else does.
Newsnight’s researchers were only interested in charities’ commercial relationships with F2F companies and completely ignored other types of professional fundraising activity
Newsnight’s position seems to be that F2F is different because charities pay on a clear per donor recruited basis, and therefore this fixed cost is only incurred by the charity once the donor has signed-up; compared with a mail campaign, for instance, where charities usually pay a broader ‘overall project’ fee, simply because it is impossible to tell accurately at the outset how many donors the campaign will bring in, so it is impossible to calculate an accurate per donor contractual fee.
We emphasised to Newsnight that most charities see this ‘payment by results’ model as a positive strength of F2F because it means that charities only pay for fundraising that actually delivers results. Newsnight ignored this.
The PFRA does in fact post indicative ‘per donor acquisition costs’ on our website, so this information is by no means concealed or secret, although the precise terms of charities’ contracts with F2F fundraising agencies are confidential, in the same way that charities do not routinely reveal how much they pay direct mail agencies or digital specialists to recruit each new donor.
A Newsnight researcher revealed his real agenda when he told the PFRA: “I think if people knew how much it costs charities to recruit them then they wouldn’t sign up [via an F2F fundraiser].” We believe that the journalists working on this story set out from the start explicitly to persuade people not to donate via F2F because of the allegedly ‘prohibitive’ costs. Of course that argument could only be maintained by systematically ignoring the costs of other forms of fundraising, some of which work out at far greater per donor than F2F, and by ignoring the return on investment that F2F generates (often over 1:3). Essentially their agenda was not to ‘inform’ the public but to convince them of the ‘truth’ of their own personal – and false – prejudices.
It is hugely irresponsible to foist personal prejudices on the public in the guise of ‘investigative journalism’, and by suppressing facts contrary to their agenda. PFRA wants people to know how F2F works. That is why we have so much information on our website.
However, if we are to be scrutinized and held to account, we do not expect people to use this scrutiny as a smokescreen to propound their own preconceptions and prejudices about what they arbitrarily consider to be acceptable fundraising costs and acceptable contractual arrangements between respectable charities and legitimate specialist fundraising companies.
If the costs of F2F are to be judged, they have to be judged in the right context. That context is –
- how much overall income a charity receives for the outlay it has to make (“Return on Investment”), both in absolute terms and relative to other forms of fundraising that charities could also use? and
- what is the social impact that charities achieve with the income they generate (which should be the ultimate test)?
This Newsnight item failed to address these issues.
For further information, contact: Mick Aldridge, chief executive.
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) Office: 020 7401 8452 Mobile: 07932 381898
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