Face-to-face fundraisers have returned to the streets in Hong Kong, Norway, and Taiwan, but it will be a while before canvassers appeal for donations on sidewalks across the United States. As fundraisers adjust to the new confines of the pandemic, many large charities with established U.S. street-canvassing programs are turning to telemarketing to continue reaching new donors.
Oxfam America employs fundraisers to canvass in four cities across the country, but it suspended all face-to-face fundraising on March 13. A week later, the charity began asking these fundraisers to call past donors.
“I just wanted to really try and find a way quite quickly that we could continue offering our staff hours,” said Ali Jones, national face-to-face fundraising manager at Oxfam America.
Jones’s team managed the quick pivot from canvassing to telemarketing because the gift-processing app it uses, Evergiving, rolled out a telemarketing feature soon after cities around the world locked down. Face-to-face fundraisers were able to use the same technology they used on sidewalks to make calls to donors from their homes.
Initially, the fundraisers weren’t appealing for donations; they were only asking past supporters how they were faring. Some donors responded with a new contribution or signed up to give monthly, Jones said. If recurring donors told callers they wanted to cancel their monthly donations, Oxfam America fundraisers asked if they’d consider pausing it for a few months instead. That proactive outreach has made a difference, Jones said.
“It gives flexibility to the donor but also for us it really helps on the retention side,” she said. “It’s been a positive experience so far.”
The team has called around 10,000 people to date, and Jones has outlined a “stretch goal” of recruiting 250 new monthly donors by phone in May. By comparison, Oxfam America’s national face-to-face fundraising efforts used to aim for at least 600 new donors each month.
Value of Face-to-Face
Although hard data is not yet available, some fundraisers — especially those searching for a mix of means to reach new donors — are encouraged by the early reports on telemarketing revenue since March. Face-to-face fundraising had been an established way for many big charities to recruit new donors. Even with opportunities to raise money by phone, those charities still have an extraordinary amount of ground to make up, industry leaders say.
“When something like this happens and it impacts the channel that brings in your largest number of sustainers, it’s really hard to replace that,” says Sherry Bell, president of the Board of Directors for the Professional Face-to-Face Fundraising Association, which supports charities and fundraising companies in self-regulating their canvassing efforts.
It’s unlikely that telemarketing will be able to make up for revenue lost by pulling canvassers off the streets for months, says James Goodridge, chief executive of Evergiving. The rates of new donors pledging monthly gifts to charities over the phone, he said, are “not going to come close.”
Fundraisers like to describe the way they draw in donors as a funnel: Potential new donors enter through the mouth of the funnel and fundraisers try to engage them. The funnel narrows as donors are cultivated, with some falling out of touch and others becoming donors or regular contributors. The wider the mouth of the funnel, the more opportunities you have to turn people into supporters. Street canvassing is thought to broaden the funnel by relying on foot-traffic volume rather than established donor data.
“It is, for us, the most proven method of growing our sustainer program significantly and quickly,” Melanie Sovern, senior marketing manager at Doctors Without Borders USA, said of face-to-face fundraising.
Of the 36,000 donors who began giving monthly to Doctors Without Borders USA in 2019, the vast majority — 25,000 donors — signed up after an interaction with a street canvasser, she said. Even so, Sovern has hopes for the charity’s new efforts with several of the companies that run its face-to-face fundraising programs to call past donors to ask how they’re holding up and make cold calls to recruit new monthly contributors.
“This is a win-win situation,” Sovern says. It allows experienced street canvassers to continue connecting with prospective donors.
But not all the benefits of face-to-face fundraising translate to telemarketing. For example, street canvassing’s catch-all nature helps increase the racial, ethnic, and age diversity of donors, Sovern and Jones say. That’s an edge that could be lost if fundraisers can only appeal to donors whose phone numbers they have.
Need for Monthly Gifts Continues
Face-to-face fundraisers’ focus on monthly donors aims to help charities keep going during lean months. The strategy, which is more popular in Britain and Canada, has gained traction in the United States since the Great Recession. A recent study of 201 nonprofits recorded a 22 percent growth in monthly gifts from 2018 to 2019, compared with an 8 percent growth in one-time gifts.
It remains to be seen, however, if donors will still choose to give monthly while the economic effects of the pandemic continue.
“We’re aware that there has already been an economic downturn, that things may get worse before they get better,” said Sovern.
In addition to telemarketing by former face-to-face fundraisers, Doctors Without Borders USA has launched digital campaigns to reach new monthly donors by email and display, search, and social-media advertising.
The charity’s health-care workers are on the front lines of the pandemic in more than 70 countries, including the United States. In appeals for recurring gifts, Doctors Without Borders USA points to their work, as well as its other emergency-response efforts.
In April, a group of the charity’s major donors offered a $100,000 gift if 1,000 new donors pledged recurring contributions online by the end of the month. The charity met that goal on April 30.
The increased need for reliable revenue during the pandemic could encourage more charities to double down on efforts to recruit recurring givers. “A lot of organizations believe that now is an opportunity for them to grow their monthly giving programs in a way in which years ago — three months ago, six months ago — you would have fought an uphill battle,” said Steve MacLaughlin, vice president for data and analytics at Blackbaud.
Fundraisers should contact previous one-time donors and ask them to give monthly and demonstrate to new donors how their gift supports the mission, MacLaughlin said. “This is not a time to stop or put the brakes on a fundraising program. We saw that happen in the past recession,” he added.
As Sovern put it: “The urgency is there. We need the sustainers.”
Face-to-Face Reimagined
That urgency has encouraged more collaboration among nonprofits and the companies that hire street canvassers — a development that Bell at the Professional Face-to-Face Fundraising Association says has been a bright spot during the fog of the pandemic.
Since March 10, the association has convened weekly conference calls to update nonprofits and face-to-face fundraising firms on local and national policies and how the industry is responding at home and abroad. The calls are open to members and nonmembers of the association. Participants also discuss how nonprofits and face-to-face fundraising companies can prepare for fundraisers’ return to city streets — and how those fundraisers can support charities’ efforts in the meantime.
Pausing canvassing programs has allowed charities and the companies that run canvassing programs to rethink how face-to-face fundraisers can do more than just acquire new monthly donors.
Bell points to efforts to imagine new roles for canvassers in cultivating donors. Goodridge, at Evergiving, hopes to find more points of virtual contact between face-to-face fundraisers and new donors so that fewer people cancel their monthly gifts after just three months.
Face-to-face fundraising companies, Bell said, are hoping to “show that they’re not a one-trick pony.”
Eden Stiffman contributed to reporting.