Outsourcing and the Professionalization of Fundraising

Soliciting your support on main street

Walk down my neighbourhood Main Street — a somewhat trendy area in an urban core — and you will often find young men and women representing some charity or another looking for friendly faces willing to give a little of their time to discuss the cause. Fresh-faced and exuberant, they offer a contrast to the normal donation seeking population in the neighbourhood.

This method of recruitment of potential supporters is profoundly interesting for several reasons.

First, the young men and women are not recognizable as members of the community. They are not my neighbours and I do not see them in the local stores. They are interlopers of a kind. Hunting in fertile land to build support for the cause.

Second, many of them are professionals; hired to do a job. Not eager young people moved to make a better society (though they may be this as well) but employees of firms specializing in finding donors. Companies in this space include TNI The Network Inc and DialogueDirect. There are, no doubt, some volunteer-based on-street donations, particularly for small, local charities but many are also paid to be there.

What does it say when fundraising for worthy causes is outsourced to professional firms?

Of course a big share of that initial donation (first year) goes not to the cause but to pay for the effort of finding you. That initial cost of identifying the donor becomes a smaller overall cost the longer the donations continue.

It is not inherently bad to solicit this way and is clearly effective for the organizations. Clearly, young people get jobs (presumably meaningful ones), charities get funds, and people support the causes they might otherwise not get around to supporting (in-person requests are more powerful than advertising). For charities, they get to control their brand (ensuring consistent on-message communication about the cause). And maybe it is more efficient (and even cheaper) for the organization to raise money this way as opposed to more grassroots organizing of volunteers for in-person solicitation.

Inherently, soliciting support in this way seems to lose something in the translation though. It is an-person appeal without the true personal touch. It is the appearance of community without the actual community participation.

Outsourcing is not just something that detached, unfeeling companies engage in to make more money and keep share holders happy at the expense of the local labour market. This may be the ugly side of outsourcing but it is not the only one. Outsourcing is whenever we decide that rather than doing it ourselves we find a specialist organization to do it for us.

In a way, it feels like we are all outsourcing more and more aspects of our life and the fact that charities do so is telling in that they, like many of the organizations we deal with are becoming more professional and structured. Not-for-profit does not mean volunteer.

How do you feel about organizations you support paying someone to raise money for them?