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PFRA members record second most successful year ever for face-to-face donations

21/06/11

The Public Fundraising Regulatory Association – the self-regulatory body for all types of face-to-face (F2F) fundraising – today [June 21, 2011] announces the end-of-year activity results for F2F.

PFRA members secured more than 730,000 new Direct Debit donations, the second most successful year PFRA has recorded, second only to 2008/09.

Door

2008/09

2009/10

2010/11

Change

% Change

London

49,411

65,856

83,546

17,690

26.9

Outside London

430,500

349,185

432,388

83,203

23.8

Scotland

38,844

32,245

43,725

11,480

35.6

Total

518,755

447,286

559,659

112,373

25.1

 

Street

2008/09

2009/10

2010/11

Change

% Change

London

123,898

92,089

80,853

-11,236

-12.2

Outside London

90,878

76,702

77,957

1,255

1.6

Scotland

7,139

8,874

11,800

            2,926

33.0

Total

221,914

177,665

170,610

-7,055

-4.0

 

 

2008/09

2009/10

2010/11

Change

% Change

Total

740,670

624,951

730,269

105,318

16.9

The trend for more donors to be recruited through doorstep F2F continues, with doorstep recovering from what now appears to be a temporary fall in 2009/10 to reach its highest total since PFRA began keeping records. In fact, all the increase in new donations is accounted for by doorstep fundraising with street fundraising registering a slight fall.

PFRA suggested that the sudden drop in street sign-ups from 222,915 in 2008/09 to 177,665 in 2009/10 was probably in large part due to professional fundraising organisation Dialogue Direct going into administration. Although two agencies were set up by former Dialogue Direct staff, it would appear that the hole this agency left has not been filled on the street, and that this capacity has shifted on to the doorstep.

 Michael Naidu, assistant director of fundraising at Mencap and PFRA’s acting chair says: “Perhaps this isn’t surprising. With the uncertainty surrounding street F2F caused by delays to the implementation of Part 3 of the Charities Act 2006, many charities seem to be moving their recruitment budgets to doorstep F2F, which is not affected by CA06. This is the case even though we know that many agencies are full to capacity and turning away some charities that are requesting contracts for street fundraising.”

However, the undoubted success for street fundraising is in Scotland, where new donations increased by 33 per cent.

PFRA began incorporating prospect F2F (solicitation of contact details to use for a subsequent fundraising ask) into our allocation procedures in January 2011. We do not record the number of donors recruited by these follow up calls, which are therefore not included in our returns. Instead we record the number of fundraising sites used for prosepct F2F, of which we allocated 709 until the end of the financial year: 475 in London, 213 outside London and 21 in Scotland.

The 2009/10 figures will be officially announced at the PFRA’s AGM to be held in London on Tuesday 21 June, 2011.

* PFRA calculates sign-ups through our levy returns (PFRA members pay a levy of 75p for every donor recruited). We are therefore extremely confident about the accuracy of our figures.