The other day, I wrote a story about Charlie Elphicke, Conservative MP for Dover & Deal, who advocated a ban on face-to-face fundraising.
Elphicke’s remarks were made in passing, as part of a larger debate which focused on other things, but they were made memorable by the level of hatred he displayed for chugging. Chugging, he said, was “one of the great infestations of modern life that lashes out at people in the street”; it was “toxic to the charity brand”. And it was an “abuse and invasion of our personal space”.
Interestingly, the comments on the story, underneath and online, seemed universally to think both that Elphicke overreacted, and that reporting his comments was the wrong thing to do. But if you ask the public, many of them think that he’s hit the nail on the head.
After I wrote the story, it received a lot of criticism from fundraisers, who felt that Elphicke was barking up the wrong tree and we were wrong to report him. So I took a straw poll of about 10 of my family and friends. All are Londoners. Most have no connection to charity. What do they think of face-to-face, I asked? Was Elphicke overdoing it?
Their answer was clear. No, he wasn’t.
Their opinions differed only in the level of animosity. None had a good word to say about it.
Earlier this year a Third Sector poll carried out by Panelbase found 37 per cent of 1,224 people thinking face-to-face was “important but annoying” and the same percentage considering it “just plain annoying.”
A recent Guardian poll found that 93 per cent of people wanted tighter controls over chuggers. Underneath the poll are 222 comments, universally negative, ranging from the relatively mild – “Can’t we just ban them?” – to the vitriolic – “Arm the unemployed with AK47s and allow them to shoot chuggers like dogs”.
So it seems pretty clear that there’s a substantial current of animosity towards face-to-face fundraising.
Nonetheless, a lot of our readers seem to feel that Third Sector should be steering clear of this issue. They seem to feel that when it comes to fundraising, we should produce only positive, helpful stories and censor the chugger-bashing.
I can completely understand this feeling. It must be really hard to raise money for charity, and those who do so must rely on huge doses of confidence and optimism to see them through the day.
I can see that to keep this mindset, the best thing must be to avoid and ignore sources of doubt – to pretend that they don’t exist. And when there’s so much bad news around, I can see why fundraisers can get quite aggressive in demanding that it isn’t brought to their attention.
But I don’t think it’s the right attitude. The fact is, street fundraising is really winding the public up, and charities need to find a way to tackle that fact.
I also think that there’s a mental blind spot here. The Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman found that people who are in favour of something – who see its benefits – are reluctant to acknowledge its shortcomings. Chugging does have obvious advantages. It raises much-needed money for charities. The question is whether that’s a good enough reason to alienate so many people.
Chuggers, in straitened times, are casting their nets ever wider, and the Great British public, who have enormous generosity and great goodwill to charity, are being over-fished. I feel that goodwill is being used up faster than it can be replenished. Their trust and confidence in charity is very gradually being eroded. It will take a long time to grind them down, because their trust began at a very high level, but people’s affection for charity is not an infinite resource.
I’m sure that doing something every day that irritates people can’t be a good tactic for your future reputation.
So my view is that change is needed. The sector needs to take action to make chugging sustainable, self-policing, and sufficiently infrequent that the Charlie Elphickes of the world get less upset, and focus on other things.