Change of approach needed for face-to-face fundraising to be successful

Published by

TBM Team

Covid-19 saw most face-to-face fundraising grind to a halt. With measures easing, there is a new appetite for having conversations that charities can build on, however, in the post-pandemic world, the comeback of face-to-face fundraising will only be successful if charities change their approach.

Vaughan Thomas, founder of Formunauts One which is the world’s first marketplace for the face-to-face community, launched at the end of February 2021. They have seen increasing amounts of activity since 12 April 2021. “We have had a real positive response from the public, it is almost as if people are craving to have new, safe, socially distanced conversations,” Thomas says.

Pre-covid, face-to-face fundraising showed huge inefficiencies, with a 100 conversations perhaps only leading to three sign-ups. With the high-street facing an uncertain future, those historic inefficiencies are likely to hit hard. “We want to understand why the 97 people say no. We are curious. That’s a huge inefficiency figure, what’s driving that?”, says Thomas.

Thomas thinks it’s time for charities to up their game. “Charities have to think like a social enterprise/business. They have to forecast and for that they need to have a recurring income. A big income stream is members of the public, who are willing to show support in a number of ways, however, through all of their commercial dealings, donors have come to expect an experience and a journey from the organisations they interact with. Increasingly, they are looking for the same things from the charities they support.”

Thomas believes it’s time to change face-to-face fundraising into more of a pull channel for donors: “We need to start treating donors as individuals and offering them value. We need to learn from the private sector and deploy different tactics. We need to move to a model where we create face-to-face campaigns that encourage new donors to come to us.”

When Formunauts One went to market, they wanted to do things differently, and part of that was bringing in different types of advisers to help them deliver on their vision. One of the ways was using Legal Design, a new way of delivering legal services which aims to demystify the legal journey and help make it accessible to those who use it. There are lots of parallels.

“We were really excited by what Vaughan was trying to achieve. We took time to understand the difference Formunauts One would be making to charities and the supporters of those charities. The framework agreements that we have put together have been the first thing that charities have engaged with and the response has been phenomenal. Legal Design is all about doing things differently and empathising with the end user. There are lots of parallels here with Formunauts and what they are trying to do to revolutionise face-to-face fundraising.

“The world has changed, and we all need to think about the best way of doing things. Doing what we always did in the way we have always done it is no longer an option,” said Jamie Murray of Oxford-based Lawbox Design. Thomas, of Formunauts, agrees.