queer ideas

When to choose choice

Choice is becoming a buzzword in fundraising. But just how important is it?

Over the last few years, organisations like Kiva, DonorsChoose and CRUK (with MyProjects) have done rather well by offering people a chance to decide how their donations are used. Kiva, which launched in 2005, has generated over $200 million for people working their way out of poverty. DonorsChoose, which is only two years older, has generated over $77 million for schools in need of teaching materials. And CRUK has over 400 individual fund raising pages and 23 project pages which have raised hundreds of thousands of pounds.

But is choice the key factor that lies behind this level of fundraising success?

There are a number of charities that have built websites around the offer of choice who haven't been quite so successful.

Take FORGE for instance. I wrote a piece about this charity back in 2008 on how they came unstuck when they focused on offering online donor choice as a means to raise funds.

See The Difference, who do some great social networking activity to promote their site, also seem to be struggling (see this post for more thoughts on their approach to fundraising). If you look at their most funded projects on their website, few have generated more than a thousand pounds.

And My Action For Children which generated a massive amount of hits from press advertising and celebrity tweets seems to have converted just a tiny percentage to donors. Sign-ups just one month later have dwindled to a trickle.

I believe the different levels of success seen by the two sets of examples is down to something other than choice.

Kiva is fundamentally different. It asks people to lend - not give. And though a supporting donation is suggested (to fund the work of the KIva organisation) this is discretionary. In effect, you are not giving to charity as you can get your money back. As we've seen in the UK with Lend With Care, this is an offer that people find different and attractive. Add feedback on the impact of your loan and fantastic celebrity and corporate support (most notably that offered by YouTube) and you have a financial success on your hands.

DonorsChoose has also benefitted from celebrity support. But at its heart it offers something very special – great feedback. Though they will accept any size of gift, DonorsChoose prompts donors to give $100 by promising them a feedback pack from the school they help. This pack contains a letter from a teacher along with drawings, thank you notes and photographs from the children who've benefitted from the donor's gift. DonorsChoose encourage schools to get really creative with these packs and see them as so important that if a school fails to provide them to donors they can be excluded from the site. The other stroke of genius of the DonorsChoose model is that they also offer a thank you pack to everyone who gives a closing gift. So if a project has just a few dollars needed to hit target, the donor who makes up the shortfall - even if it really is just ten or twenty dollars – gets a thank you pack as well.

Take a look at CRUK's MyProjects and you see two main types of donation – gifts in memory and gifts in response to personal fundraising pages. In this respect it is not that dissimilar to JustGiving. The most successful of the projects on MyProjects is the Santander staff fundraiser for mobile cancer awareness units. Santander staff have been encouraged to raise money for CRUK with the promise that if they hit a certain target they will be eligible for a trip to Brazil to help renovate a school. MyProjects has simply functioned as an online means for them to run personal fundraising activities (see what I mean about it being just like JustGiving?).

If choice was that important to donors, thousands of tiny niche charities would be doing much better. If someone wanted to offer support for disabled children in London for instance, all they need to do is type those words into Google and they'd be presented with a long list of organisations that would love a donation. And more to the point, they would probably all offer a more rewarding and personal experience of giving than can be had when you donate to the national charities you'd find bidding on those search terms through AdWords.

And here's another example of why I think that choice is only a small part of the route to better fundraising.

I started out my fundraising career at ActionAid (about twenty years ago) where I worked on a product called ProjectAid.

ActionAid raised most of its income through child sponsorship. Supporter feedback and research told us that people loved knowing how their money changed a child's life. It also told us that some people found sponsorship expensive and others found it 'emotionally unattractive'.

We took a few logical steps and the end result was ProjectAid. We'd ask the donor to sign up to a regular gift and every four months we'd send them details of projects in need of funding. They could choose the one they wanted to support and we'd then report back on how work was progressing. I still have the first recruitment piece we ever produced and, as you can see, It's not that far from the 'game changing' ideas of crowd funding that we see today. Just on paper rather than on-line.

We tested it with a variety of media, but it didn't do that well.

But what was particularly interesting was how donors responded to the offer of choice. Most ended up ticking the 'where the need is greatest' box on the donation form. The product eventually was used as a 'drop ask' for people who were interested in child sponsorship but found the price too high. It was superseded by another product that concentrated on providing good feedback, which in the long run was more effective.

I've been involved in offering choice to donors in a number of different ways over the years and found similar results pretty much every time. Some people do value choice (particularly with causes such as cancer research and with high level gifts), but many others were more interested in hearing about need, impact and what they had done to make a difference. As one donor put it (and I paraphrase)...

"You're the experts on this. I just want to know that my money has helped".

In my experience, that's what charities should be focusing on. As I mentioned in a previous post, choice is only important if it is relevant. If it isn't, it can become a chore and actively turn donors off.

And if you are interested in finding out why, you should probably take a look at this study featured in Neuromarketing on choice fatigue.

If used appropriately, choice can probably enhance your offer, but, using the tried and tested (and tired) golfing analogy, it should be one of a number of clubs in your fundraising bag, rather than a single club that you rely on for the whole game.

What's the point of branding?

So you've got a brand. You've brainstormed with stakeholders, you've paid many thousands of pounds for a sparkling new logo, a corporate identity and a list of adjectives that are going to help you change the world.

And what's the result?

Has it increased response rates to your mailing packs? Has it helped reduce attrition? Has it increased donor loyalty?

If it hasn't, maybe something is going wrong.

In the commercial world, a brand adds value to a product or service. In short, it increases income.

For charities, things aren't so clear cut. I've seen 'brand expenditure' justified in terms of increasing awareness or extending knowledge of organisational goals.

All well and good. But if that doesn't translate to more supporters giving and doing more, I'm not sure that a new brand can be classified as a success.

That's why I was rather concerned to see the some of the findings from the 2010 Charity Brand Index survey (you can see my thoughts on the 2009 survey here).

A total of 3,203 adults took part in the survey, answering questions regarding recognition, individual giving, publicity work, trust and support.

When the answers had been cross-tabulated and added up, each charity was left with a score and this year, Cancer Research UK came out on top, followed by BBC Children in Need, RSPCA, Macmillan Cancer Support and Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity. SSAFA Forces Help saw the biggest rise and NDCS had the biggest fall.

You can see the full index here.

But what's most interesting are the findings about general attitudes to charities. And for me, one result stands out above all the rest – they found that less than 30% of people thought that charities were using money well, down from 32.5% in 2009.

It's left me scratching my head. Donors are continuing to lose touch with the charities they support. Trust might be up, but what about engagement? it seems to be in decline.

We know that one of the most powerful ways to engage a donor is to show them how you have used a gift. It's something donors welcome. When you ask them what they want from a charity, it's pretty much top of the list.

And if we are trying to add value to a charity brand that will translate into more funds, surely this research is showing us that we are doing something wrong. Any study of attrition rates would tend to confirm this view.

Donors have ultimate power. If they don't like the way they are treated after giving once, it is highly likley that their next gift will go elsewhere.

Perhaps they might think that by ignoring their role, we are being a little ungrateful and maybe even a little arrogant. It's happened to organisations like GAP, Coca Cola and Tropicana. There's no reason why it couldn't happen to us to.

So rather than producing advertising that says how great our charity is, perhaps we could learn from what fundraisers were doing before many of us were actually born and produce ads like this from January 1964 that thank donors for their role in raising £1,000,000.

It shows donors just how important they are - in no uncertain terms...

"So people live who would have died. And children have a chance... because you sent a cheque".

If I'd given to the appeal, that ad would have certainly made me feel good. Maybe I'd have given again. And perhaps that's what charity branding should actually be about.

How should we defend face-to-face fundraising?

During my recent break from blogging, I've been keeping an eye on the debate about face-to-face fundraising.

It's been quite a saga.

It was obviously all kicked off by the piece on BBC's Newsnight. If you missed it, you can watch it here.

The central story was that charities pay professional face-to-face companies to recruit regular givers, paying up to £136 for each new donor they sign-up. 

Newsnight questioned whether this was a good use of funds, citing industry figures that show more than 50% of people recruited in this way cancel their direct debit in the first year. 

With the average annual value of a donor standing at about £90, their view was it seemed as though most of a donor's gift was going to the professional companies – not to fund the core work of the charity.

It appears from reading the PFRA response that it wasn't the most even handed piece of journalism...

'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.'

But stitch up or not, the sector doesn't seem to have handled this story particularly well.

When the BBC asked charities how much they spend to recruit a new face to face donor, only two responded – Cancer Research UK who pay £112 a head and the British Heart Foundation who pay £136. Newsnight informed us that other charities cited 'commercial confidentiality' as the reason for their reluctance to respond.

And though they were asked, charity CEOs weren't up for defending face-to-face on the show. Mark Astarita, Director of Fundraising for the British Red Cross, explained why ...

'Newsnight wanted to set us up in a head-to-head situation with a small charity that hates face-to-face,” Astarita said. “It would have been a David and Goliath-type battle which nobody would have won.  It would have been damaging to the whole sector and so everybody made a wise judgement not to play that horrible game."

“You could tell by the way they structured all the questions that they had an agenda – it was not an ‘investigation’, they wanted to make their story stick.”

In the end, Newsnight was unable to find charities to take part and so at the last minute decided simply to interview a charity that uses face-to-face.  That was when the BHF agreed to take part, Astarita said.

He added that if Newsnight had proposed a straight interview from the outset, he expected charities would have been queuing up to defend the practice." '

The trouble is, whether we like it or not, it's the media channels that set the agenda and if we don't respond intelligently, we'll all be worse off.

A recent survey by the Charity Commission has shown that over the last two years, 11% of people have lost trust in charities, with media coverage about charities and how they spend their donations seemingly driving this change in attitude.

Which is why I was disapointed to read about the debate at the recent IOF conference on face-to-face fundraising, where PFRA CEO, Mick Aldridge summed up the sector's reluctance to defend face-to-face fundraising...

'Aldridge's attack wasn’t limited to the sector’s reluctance to defend face-to-face, but also centred on the “intolerable and hypocritical... ‘slagging off’ that face-to-face receives from some of our so-called colleagues from other fundraising disciplines”.

“That is rank hypocrisy and it has to stop,” he said. He noted that direct mail recruitment costs “are many orders of magnitude higher than for face-to-face” and challenged advocates of that medium, and others such as digital, to publish figures on RoI and costs for general viewing.'

It seems that the PFRA is concentrating on defending face-to-face on cost – because it recruits donors more cost-effectively than press or direct mail it should own the moral high ground. That's fine if the debate is within the charity sector. But as we know, it's a little wider than that.

Mick has also pointed out that we need a champion to defend the technique. And he's right, but I'd go one step further.  We are one sector and we all succeed or fail together. We need every single charity in the land to commit to champion fundraising in all its forms. Because, as it is now,  it's quite obvious that few donors fully appreciate the impact of their response to our fundraising messages.

A series of nfpSynergy studies has found that donors think that just 25 pence in every pound they donate actually goes to fund actual 'work'. The perception is that the majority of their gifts are used to cover administration and fundraising costs.

And it's people like Rarry Revan, who comments on another piece in Civil Society, who suggests a blindingly obvious way that we can tackle this misconception...

'Get a beneficiary out there, maybe a cancer survivor who said without face to face I wouldn't be alive. Or an African doctor who learnt their trade because of donors who were signed up on the doorstep.'

By taking this approach we shift the debate from how we raise money to the impact of how we spend it. And every single charity in the land can help achieve this goal. It's not about big advertising campaigns either. We'll win this argument on the micro-level.

Take Care International for example. They have shown that the attrition rate of face-to-face can be halved by providing donors with personalised, high quality feedback on how their donations have been used.

And ActionAid generates response rates to thank you feedback packs that many charities would love to get from their actual appeals.

The fact that a significant percentage of people find face-to-face recruiters irritating is just one symptom of a wider problem. We have to remember that people complain about DM, telephone fundraising and even online advertising too. Donors simply aren't linking their gifts to any measurable outcome.  And we are verging on stupid if we continue to ignore the desire amongst donors to know what difference their gifts have made.

People pay for value and if, after a great face-to-face recruitment process, you find yourself on the receiving end of a stream of self-congratulatory newsletters and appeals for more money it's not surprising that you might feel a bit short-changed.

The moral high ground on this matter is well within our grasp, but it won't be gained through an internal debate about relative costs nor through interviews on Money Box or Newsnight.

Instead we should confront criticism through aggressively demonstrating the benefits of our work.

By doing so, we'll ensure that the amazing goals we are striving for - cures for disease, the eradication of poverty and the end of cruelty and injustice - are worth the inconvenience of a smile and invitation for a quick chat from a nice fundraiser on a street corner.

The misdirected power of the brand

Some people think I don't like branding. They are wrong. I love great brands. The trouble is that I don't think many charity brands are very well managed and there are a growing number of pieces of research that serve to confirm my beliefs.

I thought I'd share a few of them after reading the recently published Charity Brand Index which features the UK's top 100 charity brands.

It was compiled using survey data from 3,032 people, who were asked about their awareness of charities and the impression they had of them.

"Respondents were asked about their awareness of 30 charities randomly selected from the list of 150. After highlighting those they were aware of, they were then assigned a maximum of five charities to focus on in the main survey. Respondents were then asked their views on these 150 charities, the metrics subsequently making up the top 100 ranking being: relevance, distinctiveness, familiarity, trust and impression.

‘Consideration to donate’ acted as a proxy for all these measures, which were then all multiplied by prompted awareness to ensure that charities which were loved by a few, but had low awareness, did not achieve a disproportionate rank."

The top ten were:

Macmillan Cancer Support
Cancer Research UK
NSPCC
RSPCA
BBC Children in Need
British Heart Foundation
Comic Relief
Marie Curie Cancer Care
RNLI
British Red Cross

Macmillan, with voluntary income of less than a third of Cancer Research UK, were surprise winners. Their high familiarity score and an extremely positive impression of the brand lifted them clear of the competition.

But what does all this actually mean? What is a brand actually worth?

A study published earlier in the year attempted to estimate the value of American charities. They gave top spot to the YMCA (a charity that doesn't even feature in the UK list) with a worth of almost $6.4 billion. The charity with the best brand image was the American Cancer Society.

A different set of criteria was used to build the US list. They included such factors as size of budget, potential for future growth, volunteer numbers and news coverage in their analysis.

These differences in approaches seem to back up John Murphy's thoughts on brand valuation. John founded global branding consultancy, Interbrand, and has a refreshingly honest opinion on the subject...

"Brand valuation is a 'social science' not a 'physical science'. Valuation opinions will always be just that – opinions."

For me, any assessment of charity brand value has to be based on the additional income it will help generate. The fact that someone knows that a charity exists or answers a specific need is worthless if it doesn't translate to the bottom line. And 'propensity to donate' doesn't quite cut the mustard for me.

It's why reports and studies that inflate the value of brand building activities are so dangerous. Branding is seen by a growing number of people as a universal panacea to a charity's ills and there is precious little evidence to back up their belief.

Branding just doesn't seem to be solving the deep-seated problems the sector faces.

Joshua G2 undertake research into which brands are most loved and hated by the British public and have included charities in their studies. Last year they found that Cancer Research was most loved (followed by Macmillan, RSPCA, NSPCC and PDSA) and Christian Aid was most hated (followed by War on Want,  Oxfam, The Salvation Army and RSPCA). Results for 2007 are here.

But what's interesting is to try and uncover why charities engender these emotions.

Luckily GMI / Mintel did their own study to try and uncover the attitudes underling these emotional reactions (also published in 2008). They assessed charities on a variety of characteristics. These included, trust, social responsibility, pride, innovation, great service, good value, good reputation, distinctive image, consistent high quality and caring for the environment. These were mapped out on radar charts. I've reproduced those for Cancer Research UK and Christian Aid. The darker shape represents the scoring for the charity, the lighter shape is the average for all charities they analysed.

You can see that Cancer Research UK scores very highly on trust and on good reputation. Christian Aid in comparison does very badly on both indices. But what is jaw-droppingly surprising is just how low both charities score on great customer service. But they are not alone – the fact is that every other charity they looked at also scores poorly in this area. Seven other radar charts are posted here (including Friends of The Earth, NSPCC, RSPCA, The Royal British Legion, The British Heart Foundation, Save the Children and Oxfam).

When asked about how engaging these brands were, the results were as shocking. Cancer Research UK was best with 12% of those surveyed describing the brand as engaging. The majority scored in single figures.

And it doesn't take a genius to understand why. Brand guidelines are almost always about the charity. Phrases such as we are brave, we are outraged, we are effective, we are honest and we are just dominate these booklets. And far too often, brand policing is solely about ensuring these sentiments are included in copy. 

What this process does is suppress the focus on generating engagement with donors. A hand typed and signed letter on poor quality stock that talks about what the donor has achieved is rarely going to appear in a set of brand guidelines, but in comparison with a branded corporate style mailing, I know which pack is going to raise most money AND bring the donor closer to the charity. And it is only through reducing the distance between the charity and the donor that we are going to engender real understanding and solidarity.

The days of the self-congratulatory brand are over. We must acknowledge that our brands live solely in the minds of our supporters. Research shows that the majority of people still trust and regard most charities highly. The role of any brand strategy should be to tackle key weaknesses and that includes managing the brand experience as well as influencing brand understanding and values. By doing so, we will take a huge leap forward in managing the ongoing problem of dis-engagement and the accompanying attrition that afflicts so many charities.

My recommendation is we do this by answering the needs of donors. If you haven't seen my posts on donor needs, I'd recommend you look at this.

By engaging and serving those who support us, attrition is being tackled and significant additional funds are being generated – even in times of recession.

Finally, if this has got you thinking, I'd recommend that you read a recent post from Aline Reed on her blog, Bluefrog Creative  where she shares some of her thoughts on brands that generate feelings of love.

Benchmarking the success of your email campaigns

If you are looking to compare the performance of your email campaigns in terms of open, click through and delivery rates, Marketing Online has a regularly updated set of benchmarking studies.

As well as global and US surveys, it also includes reports on UK campaigns and specific studies based on the differences between the various public service providers – Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL.

Loads of statistics and charts are available. This is just one that shows the rather poor click to open rates of current charity emails in the UK...

You can find details of another charity specific (US) study here.

I'd also recommend that you take a look at this recent presentation from Bryan Miller and Jonathan Waddingham which also contains some great up to date statistics from Cancer Research UK and JustGiving (including some interesting data on the increasing importance of Facebook).

Finally, some in-depth and up to date benchmarking figures on e-campaigning highlighted by Rachel Collinson. There's an emphasis on UK and Canadian organisations, but internationals are included as well. The link will take you to a presentation and PDF reports - great reading.

Pay what you choose

It seems the downturn in the amount of goods being donated to charity shops is continuing.

David Moir, head of policy at the Association of Charity Shops, is reported in The Guardian as saying:

"While we are getting reports from some members of increased demand, the main effect (of recession) is that people are not replacing their existing clothes.

"They may be selling some on eBay but they are definitely not donating them in the same volumes. When people are worried and money is tight, people tend to hoard.

"But we have, we are, and we will, continue to send out the message that unwanted clothing and other items can make an enormous difference if sold through charity shops."

Other charities are reporting a similar story. 

Cancer Research UK is desperate for stock and has recently launched a detox your wardrobe campaign to encourage people to donate unwanted clothes and accessories.

It's the same for BHF. Chief executive, Ken Blair reports that sales are up but stock supplies are down.

And at the end of 2008, Barbara Buckley, the PDSA's charity shop manager on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh was reporting that sales have increased 10 to 15 per cent on last year, with a large number of new customers:

'We've never seen many of them before,' she says. 'They're talking openly about their finances at the tills and all say they're very short of cash.'

Oxfam continues to buck the trend. I've already blogged about their partnership deal with M&S, which was launched a year ago this week (Oxfam offer a £5 M&S voucher for each bag of goods that contains at least one M&S item). It's reported that this has raised an additional £1.7m over the last 12 months. 

Innovative on-line thinking has also driven sales. Oxfam's web shop now sells more than virtual and ethical gifts. A wide selection of donated goods are also available. As a result, year on year to this January, visits to the online shop have gone up by 200% and sales by 250%.

But there are new ideas being tested elsewhere too.

I was perusing my regular copy of the Wiltshire Times (incorporating Chippenham News) when I saw details of an experiment being undertaken by the Sue Ryder Care charity shop in Melksham.

From Monday, customers will be able to pay whatever they think goods are worth, as staff remove all fixed prices from donated items. It's an interesting approach. It re-positions the shop in the charity marketplace. Rather than simply being a fund-raising vehicle it becomes a community service too. 

As Helen Reynolds, business manger for the charity's shops in Wiltshire says:

“Hopefully it will help people who need that extra jumper or coat or cutlery, but can’t afford it."

This is a new dimension in appealing for donations. 

Oxfam is in reality buying stock with the M&S vouchers; Sue Ryder Care is saying to donors that clothes will go to people – who really need them – at the price they can afford. This, at a time of recession, may drive stock donations by giving people a chance to help the people of Melksham who have fallen on hard times. 

It will also be used as a means to determine if traditional pricing models are focussed too high or too low.

Helen cites Radiohead's, In Rainbows experiment as the inspiration for her test.

Choice and honour based pricing isn't new. The New York Times, Freakonomics blog, reports on a range of different businesses that have attempted it with various degrees of success. The latest being a test on Boxing Day.

I'd love to find out how the idea turned out in practice and I'll be trying to get in touch with Helen next week so I can report back on what happened.

But the whole test has got me thinking. Suggested donation levels are a normal part of cash fundraising. We use it in our postal appeals all the time. Sometimes people give more, sometimes they give less. What would happen in a charity shop if all prices were simply suggested – giving people permission to choose what they paid within a controlled framework? That would be interesting!

It makes me wish I was still in charge of the 100 odd YMCA charity shops that I used to have responsibility for.

Face to face and email - where might they fit together?

Robert Cialdini's books have been part of my office furniture since I first discovered his work on persuasion and compliance on a trip to the US. Much of his thinking went into developing the strategy behind the prospecting campaigns that Bluefrog implemented through Gift for organisations like Oxfam and CRUK.

I’ve just caught up on some work he’s done in the last year with Rosanna Guadagno, which makes for interesting reading.

There’s a long held stereotype that I’m sure most people are familiar with. When it comes to communicating, men are rubbish and women are great. With email at their disposal, men have been further able to retreat into the safety of their cave. If they can avoid speaking to someone a few feet away by emailing them, they’ll grab the chance with both fingers.

But how does this relate to fundraising, particularly in a face-to-face context?

Back in 2002, Guadagno and Cialdini looked at how people act out expected social roles. Men are supposed to be task-oriented whereas women are relationship-oriented. So, when put in a face-to-face situation, women tend to follow the cultural stereotype. Similarly, as men are often viewed as more competitive, when they face another man they tend to be less open to persuasion.

What their research suggested is that email allows men to avoid this competitive show of force and be more open to persuasion

But this research doesn’t take into account currently existing relationships or the water muddying aspect of sexual attraction. So in 2007, Guadagno and Cialdini repeated their experiments with a focus on what they describe as “oneness”.

“Oneness refers to the idea of an interconnected identity. The closer two people feel, the more helping the other person is like helping themselves. So oneness can promote altruistic behaviour. Oneness can also be seen in terms of the classic in-group out-group dichotomy in social psychology. People show a positive bias towards other people who are in the same notional group as themselves: e.g. work colleagues.

“Oneness was very simply manipulated in Guadagno and Cialdini's study by encouraging strangers to view each other in one of two ways. In the first manipulation two strangers were shown fictional results of a questionnaire they had completed which showed they had identical personalities. In the second, the fictional results showed they had completely different personalities. In this way, the first groups 'oneness' was encouraged, while in the second it was discouraged.

“Then, as had been done in the previous study, participants attempted to persuade each other.”

The results showed that when “oneness” was low, email was a much better means of communication for men. Conversely women with high levels of “oneness” had very persuasive encounters.

In short, this means that men tend to be less competitive over email and are better able to concentrate on arguments presented, rather than being distracted by seeing the other man as a threat. Women, on the other hand,  may not generally be easily persuaded over email because there is less opportunity to form relationships from which attitude changes can be built.

What does this mean for fundraising?

Well, speaking to street fundraisers, you can see a real difference in their attitudes to recruiting people who are different from themselves. The most obvious expression of this is that young people tend to recruit young people. They don’t have much “oneness” with 65 year olds, so they rarely get recruited.

However, there seems to be a lack of "oneness" when it comes to men recruiting men. Often the reticence is on the part of the recruiter rather than the prospective donor. And it becomes more comfortable (and fun) to develop a conversation where sexual attraction plays a role – which often leads to a focus on members of the opposite sex. The fact is though, such relationships last for little more than a few minutes and don’t result in any kissing and cuddling in the back row of the cinema. Which could leave the new donor feeling a little deflated.

Maybe if there was a focus on developing a sense of "oneness" rather than using sexual chemistry at the onset of the conversation we could see a reduction in attrition. Perhaps one of the most potent tools of this technique needs to be a little better managed to make face-to-face more effective.

All that we need then is a means to reinforce the decision, perhaps online – where men seem to be more open to persuasion – and that’s what I'll be blogging on soon. Because an email is of no use if someone doesn't read it!