queer ideas

Face to face fundraising from 1910

Many people seem to think that large-scale face to face fundraising was first developed by Greenpeace in the 1990s, but it's been around far longer than that.

ActionAid were recruiting child sponsors in the 1970s by going from door to door. And Oxfam were using press ads to recruit people to collect regular pledges from their friends and neighbours in the 1960s.

But that's nothing to what the YMCA was doing back at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Around the world, new YMCAs were built with money raised through what became known as the Lightning Canvass.

The idea was simple. Get a group of young men, divide them into teams and send them out on the streets for two weeks to recruit donors who would give on the 'Instalment System'.

It was the brainchild of Charles Sumner Ward, who could well be described as the godfather of modern fundraising.

Charles was General Secretary of Grand Rapids YMCA in Michigan. And he had a problem that many CEOs of today's small charities might recognise. He had to spend most of his time fundraising rather than doing 'real' work.

As a result he came up with a plan. In January of 1892, he asked his directors to close down their desks for part of each day so they could give "wholehearted support to an intensive, organised effort to raise the Y's budget at the beginning of the year". At the heart of the idea was a dislike of fundraising that resulted in a desire "to get the agony over with quickly."

The plan worked brilliantly. Together with a group of volunteers, they raised the year's budget within a few days. For the next five years, Ward repeated the exercise with similar results.

Soon other YMCAs were asking for his advice. He introduced them to his approach and success followed success. He raised £103,000 for Boston YMCA, £64,000 for Montreal YMCA, over £160,000 for Toronto YMCA and a massive £200,000 for Philadelphia YMCA (which would be worth over £16,000,000 today)

In 1912 he brought the technique to the UK and helped set up campaigns for a number of new British YMCAs, including one for Manchester YMCA. Having searched the archives of The Manchester Guardian I've found out what happened.

350 different volunteer fundraisers working in teams known by such donor friendly names as The Hustlers, The Tender Heart Ticklers and The Gold Chasers raised £14,000 in twelve days. They did this, in their own words, by...

"scouring Manchester during the campaign...merry bands of well-intentioned highwaymen on the prowl, ready to pounce upon every good-natured-looking individual with their cry, 'your money or your promise.' "

To build excitement they erected a huge fundraising clock in Manchester city centre that allowed everyone to see the money rolling in. It was so important to the campaign that it took pride of place in the campaign brochure...

Sadly, they fell short of their target by £6,000, but the regular payments on the 'Instalment System' made up the difference.

They generated these by encouraging donors to complete a forerunner of the direct debit form. It was designed to neatly dovetail with the the clock...

The success of these campaigns wasn't down to luck. Ward had tested and proved his strategy many times. And luckily, the Manchester Guardian on the 7th of October, 1912, detailed just a few elements of the approach...

"In money-raising, the quick campaign method had proved itself to be the very best method up to the present. The best time for holding the campaign was towards the end of January, because by then dividends and rents had recently been paid, and it was the time when many people and firms set aside amounts for the year's gifts...they should not overlook the importance of having a luncheon or dinner on the eve of the campaign to which they should invite a large number of possible subscribers."

But even in 1912, there were dissenting voices that weren't convinced that face to face fundraising was the way forward. The Manchester Guardian reported the concerns of the Rev. Stanley J. Hersee who thought the effect of a lightning campaign would be disastrous...

"It was really a spasmodic effort concentrated into five or ten days; they had a tremendous reaction, and the backwash was a bad thing. Many people were growing tired of the sort of 'revolver, your money, or your life' campaign."

It just shows that even when it comes to the attitudes of donors there's nothing new in the world of fundraising. Apart from the fact that today's face to face fundraisers look a little different from their Edwardian counterparts...

With thanks to Gary Shearin for providing the images.

Are you local? Are you relevant?

Many years ago when I was fundraising for YMCA England, we undertook a direct mail campaign to assess the impact of asking people to support local work.

YMCA England is comprised of over 130 independent community based charities that work together under the YMCA brand. A characteristic that helps it understand and respond to the needs of each home community.

We focused on one particular YMCA in the south-east of England, creating a mailing pack that demonstrated the situation for homeless young people living nearby.

We had a good set of statistics on local levels of homelessness and youth unemployment along with some case studies that showed the impact this had on young people. I can even remember the line on the outer envelope...

There's a serious problem on your doorstep.

The pack was mailed to prospective donors in areas close to and neighboring the YMCA (including surrounding counties) in a test alongside our national banker acquisition pack that featured a YMCA project in the north of England.

When we analysed the results we were surprised by the response – the further you lived from the YMCA, the more likely you were to give to the 'local' pack. The response rates generated from the areas nearest to the YMCA were really rather poor.

We came up with two possible reasons:

1. The people living closest to the YMCA couldn't afford to give money to charity.
2. People didn't value the work we asked them to fund.

We discounted the first reason as the responses from the national banker pack demonstrated that people living close to the YMCA could afford to give to charity (and were happy to do so).

Which left us considering the fact that in the face of the evidence and the emotional stories they had been presented with, our prospective donors didn't really want to fund services aimed at local young people.

This could be down to nimbyism, prospective donors seeing service provision as adequate or simply that young people in other parts of the country were thought to be in far greater need than those in their own neighbourhood.

I was reminded of this test by some recent research that has been published by Action For Children surrounding the launch of their new online giving platform My Action For Children.

They asked 2,116 people the following question...

'Thinking about the support available to children in your local community specifically, which of the following statements best describes how concerned you are?'

When presented graphically, the results show that the age groups that make up the traditional supporter base of children's charities (people aged 55 and above - the bright blue and orange columns in the chart below) might not be that moved to support local children's charities.

 

In surveys of this nature, I think it's important to look at the extremes as they can help highlight the number of supporters who feel so strongly about an issue they are likely to give. In this instance, those prospective givers who describe themselves as very concerned are far out numbered by those who aren't concerned at all.

But take a look at another part of the survey and you'll see what donors really value.

When asked if they would like to know specifically what their donations go towards in their local area, donors – as you can see from the chart below – tell us quite plainly that this is something they are very interested in.

And that's an important lesson. We generate the highest response rates when we make an appeal relevant to the donor. What we have to ensure is that we don't confuse local with relevant. They are not always the same things. This means that people may well be more motivated to give to a local hospice or arts appeal - as it might be a service they have experience or need of. But with other areas of charitible activity – such as working with young people – local might not be an effective fundraising hook.

Donors do want to know what they achieve by giving, but if it is related to something they are not particularly interested in, it might not be enough to get their hand in their pocket or purse in the first place.

The full set of research tables can be downloaded here. Thanks to Action For Children for generously sharing them.

The oldest fundraising letter in the world

I've just got back from the International Fundraising Conference in Amsterdam. I'd been invited to speak about direct marketing and seeing as it was their 30th anniversary, I decided to look at what fundraisers were doing back in 1981 for some source material.

As regular readers of this blog know, I have a real interest in the history of fundraising, as I think that our predecessors could teach us a huge amount about creating great appeals.

As part of my research, I was digging around newspaper archives and the further back in time I went, the more excited I became. I found some really great stuff. I'd soon left the eighties behind and was happily digging through mind-blowing fundraising press ads from as far back as the early 1900s.

I started wishing that charities were as good at archiving as newspaper publishers, as I'd have loved to seen the direct mail produced at the time.

Unfortunately, few organisations have archives that go back more than a decade or two. The YMCA has a pretty good one and I've posted a fundraising letter that Newcastle YMCA wrote in the 1880s but I really wanted to find out if there were any earlier examples of fundraising letters in existence.

So the search continued.

And a little later I found a letter that was written shortly before 1880.

645 years earlier!

The letter in question is on SOFII, the online showcase of some of the best examples of fundraising used anywhere in the world, ever. It was submitted by Mal Warwick.

It was written in 1235 by Eihei Dogen, A Buddhist sage who was looking for funds to build a training monastery. They had already bought the land and needed funds for construction...

"We urgently need a monk's hall right now. We will set up long platforms to reside on, where we will practice day and night without fail."

But as well as asking for funds, the letter demonstrated that almost eight hundred years ago, they knew that fundraising was about more than just asking for help...

"We will acknowledge gifts by installing the donors' names in the centre of the sacred image. The myriad syllables of the seed wisdom will honour the donors and everyone."

Not bad for 1235. And it makes me think that rather than expending so much effort on innovation, perhaps a few hours spent studying tried and tested ideas on SOFII could be a much better use of your time.

You can read the letter and find out more about the appeal by visiting SOFII here.

And If you'd like to see the rest of the materials I found, I'll be posting my presentation on line as soon as I get the time to record a voiceover.

Fundraising 1880s style

Another treat from the archives from Gary Shearin at the YMCA.

This time it's an appeal letter from the 1880's and It's a cracker. The goal is the construction of a new YMCA in Newcastle-on-Tyne.

In effect, it's a very early version of face to face recruitment with a fundraising target of £5 (which is the equivalent of requesting £450 today).

The letter asks the fundraiser to visit a selection of identified prospects along with all their relatives and friends.

They are asked to collect the victorian equivalent of the direct debit - an annual subscription – of at least 5 shillings (25 pence). The advice is that those people who give a single donation are most likely to agree to a regular gift.

To help, they are given a purse to hold the money they collect (which could possibly fall foul of the current IOF codes of fundraising practice!) with the promise that this will be placed on the building's memorial stone to be laid by the Attorney General.

Finally the letter gives a nod to donor needs, pointing out the YMCA will be available for their and their children's use (only the the male ones at that time, unfortunately) before giving an endorsement from the bible.

It's interesting to note that the letter avoids the unnecessary detail that makes so many of today's fundraising materials so turgid. Though I'd probably like a little more on what exactly the fundraiser will be achieving by getting involved.

For good measure, the letter is signed by three upstanding members of the local community.

The result was this fine building.

The rest of Gary's discoveries, will be making their way to SOFII. I'll make sure I let you know when they are up.

And finally, the all-important purse.

Those young men knew how to fundraise

Gary Shearin from YMCA England has discovered a couple of great examples of YMCA fundraising materials in their archives.

I was particularly impressed with this feedback piece produced in 1916.

Before the days of computers and spreadsheets, the clerks at the YMCA were able to put together a financial report that accounted for all wartime income and expenditure right down to the last 5 shillings and 11 pence.

As Gary pointed out to me...

"There was apparently some fuss at the time about the YMCA charging a set fee for refreshments to service men and women.

This was actually a requirement of the military who were also charging for their own services and presumably didn't want to be undercut (though I'd like to think the YMCA would slip in an extra spoon of cocoa / sugar).

In today's money it equalled £113.3 Million gross - £23.4 Million surplus. Though the Statement shows how this goes back into the objectives. Though, none of these vintage YMCA materials use oblique words like 'objectives' - as we do today!"

He also highlighted an interesting aspect of the design. Expenditure is spread over two columns and is sensibly headed "How money is used". Compare this to the single column for income and you have a great two-to-one technique to show readers the value for money the YMCA is offering.

They are not frightened of sharing fundraising and admin costs either. Everything is included.

I'd suggest taking a look at some of the fundraising materials the YMCA used in the same year. The amounts they asked for – and received – were astonishing. You'll find one of their press advertisements here.

I wish the people who developed this work had written their own version of How to Fundraise. It would be worth a fortune today.

Do you need some help?

Most fundraisers work with tight budgets and to tough targets. It's part of the territory of fundraising.

Creative thinking, a focus on the needs of the donor and great database management can only take you so far.

Sometimes you need help.

But who do you turn to?

There are many consultants, agencies and websites out there that can offer advice on improving strategies and fundraising materials. But maybe you should start off by looking a little closer to home.

How about within your own charity?

I can't think of many organisations where financial management is the sole responsibility of the Finance Department and people management is just down to Human Resources. So why is fundraising so often stuck in a silo of its own?

It wasn't always the case. The YMCA, for example, used to have a very simple employment policy – your first job was to raise your own salary.

I've always thought it a stroke of genius. It means every single member of staff becomes part of the fundraising team. With joint responsibility for finding the money to keep an organisation going, everyone thinks very carefully about the impact on fundraising of changes in policy and strategy.

Take the need for unrestricted income for instance.

Most charities look at their direct marketing programme as a significant source of unrestricted funds. The juicy earmarked projects are normally saved for trust and statutory funders.

It certainly makes accounting easy, but is the blanket approach that all appeal income should be unrestricted, the best way to fundraise?

I'd suggest not.

We were looking for ways to increase income for one Bluefrog client and part of our approach was to create an appeal that offered donors the chance to allocate their gifts to specific projects.

Donors really appreciated the chance to have a say in how their money was used. Income increased by a significant amount and feedback was very positive.

What was particularly interesting however was that 80% of donors still gave the charity the final choice on how to use their dontion. This resulted in the appeal bringing in much more unrestricted income than was originally budgeted along with another large chunk of earmarked income.

More money and happy donors. That's not a bad result.

None of this would have been possible if we hadn't shared the problem with the finance team. When we explained what we wanted to achieve, they responded by changing the way they worked.

Next time you are putting a budget together or developing a strategy, why not ask those who work with you how they might be able to make fundraising more effective.

Who knows what they might come up with?

Engaging entrepreneurial donors with creative thinking

Many years ago, whilst working for the YMCA, we created a very successful donor recruitment and development campaign. The only trouble was that we didn't have enough cash to realise it's full potential.

Rather than just sighing and waiting for the next financial year, my boss at the time, Charles Donington, decided to speak to one of the more forward thinking trusts that regularly supported our work.

The result was a six figure grant to help fund our fledgling direct mail programme, thousands of new donors and, within a relatively short space of time, a level of income that put the original grant into the shade.

It's always frustrated me that I've not seen much evidence of this sort of innovative thinking being repeated.

But a recent report from The Social Investment Consultancy shows that such an approach might be more welcome amongst funders than many charities might realise.

Financing Revenue Generation in the Third Sector, investigates attitudes amongst high net worth individuals to funding revenue generating activities.

44% of the 476 people polled said they would be more likely to give to a charity that would use funding for revenue generating activities that would make it financially self-sufficient.

At the YMCA, this approach enabled us to significantly speed up our supporter recruitment programme, but this report suggests than any charity involved in independent revenue generation should consider asking donors to help expand this area of work.

Many entrepreneurs are excited by creative approaches to charitible activities and would welcome working more closely with the third sector. It's perhaps best summed up by Sir Richard Branson...

"It's so exciting to see the growing opportunity for charities and donors to work together to create new entrepreneurial approaches to help drive the scale of change we need in the world."

The full report can be downloaded here.

Fundraising is child's play

Few of us (in the UK) will have not picked up on Charlie Simpson, the 7 year-old boy who raised over £200,000 to help people in Haiti by doing a sponsored cycle round his local park.

But Charlie isn't the only child from whom fundraisers can learn.

Markita Andrews was an American Girl Scout (Girl Guides in the UK), who sold over $80,000 worth of cookies as part of a fundraising drive.

Markita had a number of tips as why she was so successful.

First off she maximised her impact by concentrating on being where she could find most customers. She would go from door to door, but she preferred the lobbies of apartment blocks where she would sell to people as they were coming home from work.

But more importantly, she framed her pitch so that customers saw the purchase as a trivial expense. She explained this when she was interviewed on the Johnny Carson show...

"I just went to everyone's house and said 'Can I have a $30,000 donation for the Girl Scouts?' When they said no, I asked would they at least buy a box of Girl Scout Cookies?"

Neuromarketing sees this approach as being similar to commercial sticker price framing. This technique compares the original price on a price tag (usually with a great big red cross through it) next to the sale price, emphasising what a great deal the customer is getting.

This is a technique that can be used by charities to generate donations in other ways than through the sale of cookies. When I was at ActionAid, we regularly compared the price of sponsorship to what else it might buy. One of the most successful ads compared the cost of sponsorship to the price someone might pay for a child's toy.

We would also break that cost down further in the body copy, demonstrating that £10 a month worked out at just 33 pence a day.

I've written before about the YMCA £5,000 pack that I ran for years in the 1990s. This pack used to generate a large number of £5,000 gifts, but within it were lower value prompts. These 'drop asks' were a powerful route to engage less affluent donors.

Asking for £5,000 didn't necessarily put people off. But using it, placed lower value gifts into context making them seem far more manageable.

It is one of the techniques that I still recommend today. If, for example, your current banker pack asks for £15, why not try a small test where you dramatically raise the primary donation request, but continue to offer the £15 option within the body of the pack.

It can't be applied without careful thought as it won't work for all packs, all offers or all lists, but it can be a very powerful tool.

When should you use suggested donation levels?

A short while ago, Google shared details of a test they undertook on "one of the disaster relief donation drives on Google.com".

The goal was to discover the ideal suggested donation level at times of an emergency – $20, $50, $100 or no prompt at all.

Full details are available here. But in short, they discovered that not using a prompt generated the highest number of donations and the highest level of income.

Does that mean you should start removing suggested donation levels from your appeals?

No.

Suggestion levels can have a powerful positive impact on both response rates and average gift. They simply need to be used intelligently.

People often have preconceived comfort levels for deciding what to give and prompting is the main way you can get people to re-consider them.

They are particularly important – absolutely essential in fact – for recruiting and upgrading mid-value donors (those that give from £100 up to £5,000).

How much do you want? is one of the key questions that donors ask (have a read of The 11 Questions Every Donor Asks if you are interested in finding out what goes on in a donor's mind when they are considering a gift). If you don't answer it, they will often give you far less than you are looking for.

By prompting (and justifying) very high suggested gifts to people who can afford them, you can generate very high levels of income and very high ROIs - even at recruitment. This pack that I developed when I worked at the YMCA, back in the early 1990's generated ROIs of up to 13:1 on cold - but very carefully targeted – lists!

At Bluefrog, we find that the majority of mid-level packs generate gifts that are at or very close to prompt levels.

Low value files (where people are giving cash gifts of between £5 and £25) are different. Even if a pack has a specific price justification, donors very often ignore it, giving their usual amount instead.

This is further complicated with emergency appeals. People will often give much higher gifts at times of obvious and extreme need, when past giving behaviour can be ignored.

Prompting can uplift low value donors. It might only be by £1 or £2, but it does work. What is most important is to test and to keep an eye on how donors respond because it doesn't necessarily work for every donor nor every charity.

At the end of the day, it is how your donors respond that is important and if, when you look at your data, you find that some of them see suggested donation levels as a turn off, the answer is simple. Don't use them.

For the rest of the file however, they are a very important tool that should be regularly used to increase donor engagement and levels of income.

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.