Facing Up to Face-to-face

Stopping passers-by in the street and asking them to sign up, there and then, to a monthly electronic payment to your nonprofit may, on the face of it, seem the quickest possible way to lose friends and irritate people.

And so it is. Fundraisers worldwide may have found face-to-face fundraising stunningly lucrative — in the short term, at least — but they’ve also contributed to general resentment and dislike of the way charity fundraisers do business, and probably to quite a few future bequests being scrubbed from wills. In many main streets and shopping malls of the United Kingdom, Europe and elsewhere, potential donors are routinely crossing the road to avoid the fundraisers they see waiting in ambush ahead, clipboards and EFT forms at the ready.

But North American fundraisers can’t afford to ignore this proved form of cost-effectively recruiting large numbers of regular, committed donors. Greenpeace International, which started this trend in Europe and then rolled it out around the world, now collects more than $150 million per year from well over 1 million donors recruited in this way.

It’s up to the creativity, ingenuity and imagination of fundraisers to implement face-to-face in ways that donors will find inspirational rather than irritating. Remember the history of direct mail, still viewed by most of our prospects as junk mail. It has to be possible for fundraisers to learn the lessons of history and realize that it’s not the method or means of contacting donors that is flawed or matters most -- it’s how well or how badly fundraisers do it.

Some suggestions:

* Practice thinking about this and all other contacts from your donor’s viewpoint.

* Train your askers carefully and personally.

* Be different. The beginning of success is to be different, the beginning of failure is to be the same. Try street theater, or telling a story, or using something tactile and tangible to intrigue and engage passers by.

* Don’t always ask for money. Try to be helpful and informative.

* Offer something worth having (this is called reciprocity; the Hare Krishna people know about its benefits -- it’s why they give you a flower before asking for your gift).

* Get a hold of Harvey McKinnon’s entertaining, informative and stunningly simple little book, “Tiny Essentials of Monthly Committed Giving” (www.whitelionpress.com/TinyCommitGive.html).

Take time to watch how face–to-face fundraisers operate. Most nonprofits using face-to-face have blithely followed the trend of using young people as their (paid) solicitors, and pay them by a combination of low basic salary and per-conversion commission. These young solicitors inevitably tend to stop younger passers-by, people like themselves. But we know regular donors are mainly older people with more disposable income. Ask yourself: Are we not perhaps putting the wrong kind of people out on the streets?

Ken Burnett is author of “Relationship Fundraising: A Donor-Based Approach to the Business of Raising Money” (The White Lion Press Limited/Jossey-Bass Inc.), “The Tiny Essentials of an Effective Volunteer Board” (The White Lion Press Limited, London) and “The Zen of Fundraising,” (Jossey-Bass Inc, San Francisco.), all available via www.whitelionpress.com He can be contacted at ken@kenburnett.com