Subject: Commission Based Fundraising - The Truth!

Hello everyone,

I am starting this topic due to the countless comments on forums across the internet on the issue of fundraising by commission, which are invariably negative and not balanced in the slightest. What's more no-one ever seems to offer the view from the other side, i.e. of those who, like me, actually work on a commission basis to fundraise, and what the positive elements of this are (and believe me, there are many!). It actually makes me quite angry a lot of questions are asked in forums such as these by people from genuine charities, who cannot afford fee-based consultants, and want to know the ins and outs of commission based fundraising, but no-one is giving them any answers to their questions and our just spouting the age-old party-line given by the IFT amongst others that commission based fundraising is bad. This seems to come from a simple reiterating of wording from sites like the IFT and not actually from a real-world understanding on how fundraising works and the genuine concerns and problems charities have. Now it is time for me to provide some light on the issue:

People are of course entitled to their views, but I strongly disagree with the point that commission based fundraising is unethical and can lead to problems. This goes against anything I have seen in the market place or with my clients. Simon - the one reason you get so many people asking you to do this is the answer to the question many people ask on this site - its because MOST charities have no money to pay the extortionate fees (£250 to £1000 DAILY) charged by consultancies. What’s more, some agencies who only offer fee-based work and are against commission based fundraising, still admit that their fees can amount to 5-20% of the funds they bring in for the client. Our commission varies from 10-20%, so what is the difference? (see http://www.charity-fundraising.org.uk/about-us/faq/ for evidence of this point!)

I'm afraid the problem is that most people don't put themselves in the shoes of the charities (the clients) and accept that, as I have personally seen countless times in the charity sector, Charities have a) No or little MONEY to spend on staff, b) no or little TIME to spend on fundraising, c) NEED fundraising, d) Fundraising costs money and has to be paid for! The people that say in response to this "just hire volunteers who will do it for their CV" or "charities who arent willing to spend money on this should probably shouldnt be looking for fundraisers" or "charities should be willing to share the risk". These ridiculous answers make it sound like charities have a CHOICE, or have some untapped unrstricted gold reserves to tap into! Unfortunately, ladies and gentleman, this does not apply in the real world.

I think the big point that people miss out on with this issue, is over MOTIVATION. These points that professional fundraisers are professional individuals who need to be treated as such, essentially means nothing in the REAL WORLD. This is because: how can a salaried employee or a fee-based consultant be motivated to apply for larger donations, spend the time on long applications, increase their output and the NUMBER of applications, when they are taking home a nice fee every month?? They cannot possibly be as motivated to do this as those based on commission because they do not have the commission reward to aim for, so what is the point of them increasing their efforts?

Which unfortunately brings us to the point that most professional consultants on a salary or fee type structure rarely admit - that many consultants are expensive and actually bring in poor results. OF COURSE this is not true across the board, but I have a lot of evidence in charities across the UK that would point to the fact that salaried consultants or employees are actually probably scared stiff of having to prove their worth up against a commission- based fundraiser who is genuinely motivated by his commission to do BETTER for the charity.

There are countless cases of charities paying either fixed fee consultants a great deal of money or internal employees such as £45,000 a year salary for a fundraising director (let alone the costs of the whole team around him/her) - but net results can be very poor, with those individuals not motivated to perform above their GENERAL and BASIC duties, or where they simply direct others to do the work.

However, as an example, I recently raised £20,000 for a particular charity client in the last 6 weeks alone. Yes I take 15% of this, which is £3000 - but the workload required to raise this money was huge: almost £100,000 of proposals were sent out to many many trusts, over 30 schools were contacted and headmasters got on board (the charity does music workshops in schools), and for almost 3 months, 7 days a week, my team was preparing applications and writing letters.

Now the people who argue against commission based fundraising , ask yourself this: would the charity have received their £17,000 slice of our work WITHOUT our input? Of course not. This money has a real value to them - they are now using it to fund workshops up and down the UK, some of which is in Special Needs Schools. The countless emails I get from teachers and headmasters who tell me how grateful and happy they are for us to comem in (when they had no budgets and no support from other organisations) is endless, and extremely gratifying.

And this £17,000 worth of valuable work would NOT have come about if our team was not employed on a commission basis to do the work. Charities are too busy, too underresourced, and too poor to pay out salaries or fees. Whats more, we have a motivation to do the work so get the donor pledges back in record time.

It should also be noted that this charity in question was on the verge of bankruptcy recently, such was it poor state of finances. Could they have afforded a fee-based consultant to get them the money we brought in?

Whats more - comments over commission based work being difficult to measure, are totally unfounded. We receive a % of income brought in through direct work that WE do. Noone else will apply to the trusts we apply to, noone else will crossover or get confused with what we do, we will not do joint appeals with someone else - and if future donations are received in years to come from our first successful appeal then the charity keeps 100%of this. There is no reason why it would ever be difficult to measure the input of our work.

Another example - a mental health charity which is another one of our clients. They again have no time or money to pay fees - but they have a very valuable cause, offering counselling to depressed adults who cannot afford it. We are currently putting together a huge application to a major donor which has shown a specific interest in mental health to 2010. This application form is one of the largest in the "super-trust" world, over 30 pages long, needing countless research, refeerees input, etc. Now the client in question hasn't got the time or expertise to do it themselves or money to pay someone else (the form itself will take weeks of work - and at £1000 a day would they really benefit from paying a consultant to do this?!). However, through our input, the charity could end up being the successful recipient of a large sum of money.

And a final point of ethics - nothing is underhanded in what we do, nothing is secretive. As required by law from the 1992 CHarities Act, we are required to state in our applications to trusts and other sources of income about our remuneration agreement with our client (the charity), which we do in every case, usually through a full-cost recovery breakdown analysis which shows a % for the overheads payable to the fundraising team. Donors see this, yet we still achieve good results. One has to wonder if this is because trusts realise, as most charities in this land do (but seemingly not fee-based consultants!), that in the real world experienced fundraisers must be paid for, and if you have no time or money to do this, then there is only one choice: commission based fundraising.

Thankyou for listening - and I invite all your comments, though hopefully they will focus on the pros of commission based fundraising and not just reiterate all the negative and unfounded comments that the community usually make on this issue! And if you are a charity who agrees with this line of working - please get in touch.

Apologies for the length of this message but I felt that the truth of this issue had to finally be shown!

And in response to all these consultancies such as Wooton George that are refusing work on a commission basis - this is fine, we will happily take your clients, safe in the knowledge that we are providing income for good causes that could otherwise not be met! Have you got any contact details for them?

Best wishes

Matt