Taking It to the Streets

Old-school canvassing brings new donors to charities

Janet S. Domenitz doesn’t rely much on direct mail, telemarketing, or e-mail to recruit new donors. Instead, the executive director of the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group, in Boston, depends on an old-school, low-tech method to attract donations to her organization: canvassing.

For more than 25 years, teams from the public-interest advocacy organization have gone door-to-door in neighborhoods statewide, raising money for campaigns to protect consumer rights, the environment, and an array of other causes.

But in 2002, Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group joined a small but growing number of charities in the United States using another — and, to some, controversial — face-to-face canvassing technique called “street fund raising.”

Every weekday, two to four staff members from Massachusetts Public Interest put on T-shirts emblazoned with the group’s logo and head to high-traffic pedestrian areas in greater Boston, like Harvard Square or Downtown Crossing. There they spread the charity’s message on a key issue to passers-by, encouraging those who are interested to become paying members, make a one-time donation, or get involved in one of the group’s advocacy campaigns.

Ms. Domenitz says that taking to the streets has been surprisingly effective — especially in reaching younger donors who move frequently and are hard for charities to reach through direct mail or telemarketing because their addresses and telephone numbers keep changing.

Street fund raising is now responsible for recruiting about 15 percent of the advocacy group’s 50,000 members, and it has become a key way for both donors and volunteers to support the organization.

“It’s a great way to reach people and make connections that we can’t find by going door-to-door,” says Ms. Domenitz. Raising money from pedestrians, she adds, “fits with our mission as being a grass-roots, public-interest organization.

Popular Approach Overseas

Street fund raising has been popular in pockets of Asia, Australia, and Europe for more than a decade, particularly in cities with heavy pedestrian traffic and good mass-transit systems.

But the technique has been much slower to take hold in the United States, perhaps because fund raisers are worried that it will turn off potential donors.

Their concern is not unwarranted: Street fund raising has been roundly criticized in Britain, for instance, because some fund raisers have become a nuisance with overly assertive pitches. In London, critics have dubbed such fund raisers “chuggers,” short for charity muggers.

Still, some American charities, particularly national organizations that raise money in multiple cities, are finding that street campaigns are very effective in securing big amounts of money from people who would not otherwise give.

At Greenpeace USA, which has been using the approach for five years, about 1,000 donors are now being recruited every month on the street, with most of them agreeing to donate monthly using their debit or credit cards. The donors tend to be in their 20s and have never previously given to a charity, says Matthew Sherrington, the environmental charity’s director of development. But their gifts, which average $12 per month, amount to more than $1.7-million annually.

The approach doesn’t work in all parts of the United States, however.

“America is a driving culture, which means you’re going to end up in some cities and not others,” Mr. Sherrington says. “But you can also reach a new demographic of people that is tough to reach.”

Several other American charities, such as Children International, North Shore Animal League America, Oxfam America, and Save the Children have also recently started street campaigns.

“This type of fund raising has had success targeting a younger generation of donors who respond better to this approach than to traditional methods such as direct mail,” says Vanessa Montes, a spokeswoman for DialogueDirect, a British consulting company that opened offices in New York three years ago to run street campaigns for American charities.

And because many of the donors agree to monthly gifts, she notes, they tend to give more than they would with a one-time donation. What’s more, she says, many of them keep giving for more than a year.

Getting Over the Walls

Recruiting donors on the street is a complicated task, and charities must overcome several difficulties.

First, they must get past the skepticism that most urbanites have when approached by strangers. They must also persuade donors that they are not getting scammed when they provide their credit-card numbers or write checks.

“As society gets faster and more complex, people have gotten more suspicious,” Ms. Domenitz says. “Literally and figuratively, walls have gone up that make it harder to connect. People are more savvy and skeptical.”

Even so, defenders of street fund raising say that the approach has been consistently successful in attracting new donors and visibility for charities, although some groups have used tactics that annoy people.

In Britain, the irritation with street fund raisers has been the subject of newspaper articles.

“While the media says that the public does not like this form of fund raising, the actual figures and our own experience show otherwise,” wrote Andrew Moffatt, director of fund raising at the Mental Health Foundation, in London, in a July opinion article in The Guardian. “Street fund raising is a powerful way for potential donors to find out more about a charity’s work.”

To harness that power, however, Mr. Sherrington of Greenpeace says that charities must have the right people and the right procedures in place.

“If there’s any feeling that it’s aggressive, it’s not going to work,” he says. “If you sign someone up as a supporter under duress, they are going to go home and cancel.”

Because of such concerns, some American charities embarking on street fund-raising campaigns have used DialogueDirect or other European companies that have long conducted street campaigns, such as Fundraising Initiatives, which now has offices in Arlington, Va.

DialogueDirect uses a formula developed in Britain. The company hires its own fund raisers — or “dialoguers,” as they are called — to work in teams of five or six on behalf of a charity. Each team consists of one leader and four or five fund raisers who are trained by the company. The company looks for outgoing people with strong communication skills to make the solicitations, says Ms. Montes. Most are college graduates who are, on average, 24 years old.

When raising money on the street, the company’s solicitors wear uniforms bearing the logos of both their employer and the charity they represent. They also carry photo-identification tags, a move that officials say offers potential donors a measure of security.

DialogueDirect says its approach has yielded only a “handful of complaints” since the company began working in the United States. “We really haven’t seen too much of it,” says Ms. Montes, the spokeswoman. “The people we employ are all residents of those communities. Understanding people where they live is important.”

Satisfactory Results

Save the Children, in Westport, Conn., has begun street fund-raising campaigns in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, and Portland, Ore.

Eileen Burke, a spokeswoman for the charity, says the group has been pleased with the results. During its most recent fiscal year, which ended in September 2005, a little more than half of its 18,000 new child sponsors — who each give $24 or $28 per month, depending on which sponsorship agreement they choose — were recruited on the street. Save the Children has about 80,000 sponsors overall.

Oxfam America, in Boston, began such a campaign in October, a two-year effort to recruit 1,000 donors who agreed to give at least $21 each month, says Helen DaSilva, an Oxfam spokeswoman.

Ms. DaSilva says the campaign accounts for about 8 percent of her charity’s direct-marketing budget and is helping to expand the number of donors who give monthly. But as important as the donations, she says, is the visibility the charity has received by placing professional fund raisers in high-traffic areas in Boston, New York, and Washington.

“If it does lead to a donation on the spot, that’s fantastic,” Ms. DaSilva says. “But there is also an opportunity to tell people about our work. We can get out the message about our programs.”

Street campaigns, which allow curious potential donors to ask questions and look a fund raiser in the eye, appeal to some donors because they allow for the kind of interaction many people need before handing over their money, says Dolores Quinn Kitchin, director of public relations at Children International, in Kansas City, Mo. “It’s the human element,” says Ms. Kitchin. “It allows people to put a face on a charity. This is another way to make people feel comfortable with what we do.”

For that reason, Children International has been using street fund-raising campaigns for four years. Its canvassers are given packets bearing the pictures of children whom potential donors can sponsor with their contributions. Donors have the chance to look at the child’s face, learn about the charity, and ask questions before deciding whether to make monthly contributions through their credit cards for two years or longer.

“It’s very cost effective for us,” Ms. Kitchin says. “It allows us to be able to spend more money on children than on fund raising.”

Children International hires a consulting company to conduct its street fund raising. Such companies often charge a lump sum to recruit a certain number of new donors. (After the donor’s first gift, the charity is responsible for maintaining the relationship.)

While the cost can be high compared with recruiting donors through direct mail, fund raisers say it is not unreasonable because street fund raising generates more money over all for charity.

Such donors’ monthly gifts are larger, and they tend to give for longer periods than those who respond to direct-mail appeals. The costs vary widely, depending on what type of donor an organization wants to reach and how long the street campaign runs. But according to DialogueDirect, charities can expect that the monthly gifts they receive from donors recruited on the street will eventually equal three or four times what they pay such companies to recruit them.

However, the donors may not keep giving for as long as other people who make monthly gifts, according to a 2003 British study of donors to six charities who were recruited on the street and agreed to automatic monthly donations from their bank accounts. The donors, mostly aged 20 to 40, particularly the youngest among them, often gave for shorter periods than other monthly supporters, the researchers found. Many of them stopped giving when they switched bank accounts, changed jobs, or faced other changes in their financial status.

Stepping Back in Time

In an age of computers, TiVo, and cellphones, street fund raising is, in many ways, a step back in time, offering charities a chance to get through to people who have been overwhelmed by a glut of information and other distractions.

Ms. Domenitz, of Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group, says she has found the Internet to be a good tool for organizing those who are already committed to a charitable cause. But recruiting new supporters without spending a lot, she says, almost always requires a face-to-face interaction.

“We can’t buy $8-million ads on the Super Bowl,” says Ms. Domenitz.

“We represent the public interest,” she adds, “and we want our grass-roots mission to be real.”

Street campaigns can deliver that message on a very personal level, she says, and they can create a buzz that helps a charity stand out from the crowd.

Ms. Domenitz says she often hears from friends and neighbors who have seen her charity’s canvassers on the street and are favorably impressed by the organization’s efforts to advocate for social and political change. “That was not something we anticipated when we started doing this,” Ms. Domenitz says.

Because of its grass-roots leanings, Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group doesn’t hire outside consultants and instead deploys its own employees as street fund raisers.

The same is true for Greenpeace. “Our fund raisers are Greenpeace on the street,” says Mr. Sherrington. Using Greenpeace’s own employees, he adds, has proved to be cheaper than what the organization would pay a consulting firm to do the street fund-raising campaigns.

He says that Greenpeace, which is keeping on target in its efforts to recruit about 12,000 donors in five cities this year, has a goal to attract an additional 20,000 new donors annually with street fund raising. That would increase the 30,000 monthly supporters it has now and — with donors giving an average of $12 each month — Greenpeace could bring in an additional $2.9-million per year.

Those kinds of possibilities are causing charities to rethink their fund raising to make room for street campaigns.

And given the success of some of the drives, a few groups are also experimenting with door-to-door fund raising now.

That technique has been used by Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group but was abandoned long ago by most other charities due to difficulties in finding people at home and other problems.

Save the Children, for example, recently started a trial door-to-door campaign in New York and Chicago; officials say it is still too early to gauge its success.

Ms. Domenitz says that such campaigns, with their intimate, face-to-face encounters, could be staging a comeback that extends beyond the street corner and into the foyer.

“There’s a sense of urgency that is more palpable these days,” says Ms. Domenitz. “When we go to the door now and talk to people about global warming, for instance, the connection is much more real.”