Charity calls for ban on aggressive fundraising

An editorial by Meryl Davies, Director of Fundraising, SOS UK

Chuggers are back in the news - those people who stop others on the street and ask for money on behalf of a charity. BBC’s Newsnight has exposed the large sums that some charities are paying to agencies in order to attract new donors.

Regular donors are the lifeblood of any charitable organisation. Standing orders and direct debits give charities like ours the regular income that we need to make a difference to those we help – in our case, orphans and abandoned children. But one high profile British charity appeared on Newsnight to defend the practice of using agencies after an investigation by the BBC’s Liz MacKean asserted that the charity in question was paying agencies £136 to bring in each regular donor it found via door-to-door fundraising.

At SOS Children UK we do not make ‘cold calls’, do not knock on doors, do not stop people in the street, and do not pay outside agencies to do these things either. Yet our charitable income has increased five-fold since 2004. All we do is make sure that you can find us on the internet: it is a quietly respectful way to increase funds raised.  We let you find us, we know that you are looking for a charity with our aims, and we hope that you will find our work sufficiently important to want to stay on our website, to learn about our work and to make a donation.

Every penny of the £20 per month our donors contribute to SOS Children’s child sponsorship goes to the SOS Children’s Village where the sponsored child lives. We have SOS Children National Associations in 124 countries and we only accept donations when we know we can get the money to our colleagues in the country for which it is intended.

Being stopped on the street is not pleasant. And it is reported that cancellation rates of direct debits made on the street are 6.5 times higher than the cancellation rates of direct debits to SOS Children UK. Being called at home by strangers is intrusive: a recent Which survey found that 75% of people object to cold calling. And we know that direct mailing to lists of people who may never have expressed an interest in us is a waste of the money our donors have entrusted to us, is bad for the environment, and is not the right way to let people know about the work that we do.

We would be delighted if cold calling and cold mailing were made ‘opt in’ only and people no longer received calls and mailings they did not want. We would welcome an end to the use of chuggers: the method is disrespectful and the cost is clearly high. We know that we have to be accountable to our donors and we are proud that SOS Children can show how we use our donors’ money to help the children who are in our care.