We Need to Talk About Face-to-Face Fundraising

8th March 2023 by Daniel McDonnell

At the end of May, the first International F2F Fundraising Congress will take place in Vienna, providing a global platform for learning, skill sharing and innovation around direct dialogue fundraising. AAW’s Tobin Aldrich and Imogen Ward are looking forward to attending and talking about how big data can help us all keep face-to-face donors for longer. As a taster before the event, speaker Daniel McDonnell, Global Fundraising Specialist at UNICEF shares his thoughts below on using data to create successful F2F fundraising teams.

The charity fundraising sector is facing a significant staffing shortage and it’s difficult to recruit and retain the right talent. This is especially true for face-to-face (F2F) fundraising, a role which we all know can be demanding, despite how exciting and rewarding it is.

It’s been that way as long as I can remember, and there are no easy solutions to it.

But I think that there are two words which can alleviate some of the woes we face here. They are words fundraisers are already very familiar, albeit in slightly different guises; retention and journey. And F2F fundraising has a big opportunity to innovate around both.

Thinking about retention; F2F has traditionally used somewhat crude KPIs such as volume of new donor sign-ups and average donations. What we’ve begun doing at UNICEF is further examine our data to better understand the lifetime value of each new donor.

We seek to understand donor behaviour based on things such as:

• The donor’s age;

• The amount they signed up for;

• The donor’s location;

• The sub-channel recruitment method, e.g. door, street, private site;

• Their payment method;

• Any extra one off cash payments, payment delinquencies; and

• Any donation amount upgrades or downgrades.

This deeper analysis allows us to predict with some accuracy when each donor will break even and their value in the longer term.

And vitally, this is meaningful information we can share with our F2F fundraisers. This means that rather than telling fundraisers to engage those who are most likely to sign up, or  just to take a guess at who looks generous, they can put their energies into those candidates most likely to create the greatest lifetime value. This enables prioritisation and data-driven decisions, something which the charity sector does not typically do as well as the commercial world. It means F2F professionals know when it’s worth engaging in a more challenging conversation, or when to just back away.

This in turn means we can give our fundraisers a tangible, predictive value for the donors they recruit and let them know the impact this has. We can tell them, ‘You’ve created this impact today…’, or ‘You’ve built part of this building, provided for this family,’ and so on because we know what the donors they have recruited are likely to give over the long-term. This means so much more than the abstract ‘You’ve recruited four donors today’. This can have a massive impact on a F2F fundraiser’s morale and job satisfaction and can therefore increase the likelihood they will be more productive and stay in the job longer-term.

We also need to start thinking about the F2F fundraiser journey. We’re used to plotting out donor journeys and thinking about their experiences, but we can neglect our fundraisers. One fundraiser can be worth hundreds if not thousands of donors so we must not take them for granted.

This means creating a calendar like you would with the donor journey. On this you can plot times of the year when you’ll be running internal campaigns to motivate, empower and inspire your teams. From welcoming to thanking and celebrating, you can even pre-empt pain points in the fundraisers’ journey where there are lows in motivation or peaks in resignations. The way we see it, the more engaged, valued, motivated and better informed your F2F fundraisers are, the more likely they are to do a good job and want to stay with the organisation.

I’m looking forward to speaking about these and other topics relating to the use of data to create successful F2F fundraising teams at the inaugural International F2F Fundraising Congress, taking place in Vienna this 30th of May to the 1st of June. This event is an incredible opportunity to bring together the global community of F2F fundraisers for the first time for peer-to-peer learning and valuable networking.

I strongly believe that the more we share as a profession, and as a sector, the more we all benefit. We know that F2F has not necessarily had the best reputation historically, but if one of my F2F fundraisers gives a donor a great experience, it reflects well on the charity sector as a whole and makes them more open to other fundraising communications.

As charities continue to face challenging times, it’s really important we do what we can to deliver the best possible experience and as much as possible take clear data driven decisions to improve our ways of working. Collaboration as a profession will be key if we are to make this happen.

Join Daniel – and the AAW Team - in person at the first @International F2F Fundraising Congress (#F2FCongress23) in Vienna, Austria this 30th May to 1st June. Visit https://www.f2f-fundraising.com/ for details and to register.