“Here’s your disturbing wake-up call for Monday, September 17^th …”

That’s how The Agitator started its week nearly 3 years ago. That post — Take This to Your Board & CEO Today! — warned of the tsunami-like wave of major media stories spotlighting questionable fundraising practices and alerted readers that great damage was in store unless thoughtful action was taken.

Fast forward: Here’s your disturbing wake-up call for Monday, May 18^th, 2015.

For the past 4 days the British tabloids — plus media as august as The Guardian and the BBC — have focused in near hysteria over on the fundraising practices of UK charities. Practices that allegedly triggered the suicide of a 92 year-old donor.

To give our non-UK readers a flavor of what your colleagues in Great Britain face this Monday morning, here’s the lead from a piece in the online edition of the Daily Mail, which also covered the story on the front page and an inside double-spread in its print edition:

            “The grandson of a 92-year-old who jumped to her death after being hounded by dozens of charities
today accused them of sharing her number knowing she ‘would give them everything that she had’.

            “Britain’s longest-serving poppy seller Olive Cooke was found near to the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol last week after ‘losing her faith in people’ and handing over most of her pension.

            “Her grandson Kevin King, 38, said today she was ‘exhausted’ because charities had been trying to ‘milk her’ for years and ‘pestered her’ with cold calls at all hours and hundreds of begging letters.

            “He said ‘I heard they were passing her number around saying ‘this person is really generous, give this number a try.’ She was being pestered all the time. It was like they were trying to milk her.”

            “He added: ‘As soon as you open the door a little bit (to charities) it goes wide open’.”

David Cameron, the UK’s Prime Minister weighed in: “I know there is a code that is meant to protect people from feeling pressured by charities and I hope the Fundraising Standards Board will look at whether any more could have been done to prevent this.”

As did Peter Lewis, CEO of the UK’s Institute of Fundraising: “Fundraisers know that it is absolutely critical to maintain public trust and confidence in charities, and an important part of this is to fundraise in the right way and to the highest standards. The IoF Standards Committee – which sets the rules for fundraising across the UK – will review any learning following Mrs Cooke’s sad death to make sure that our rules and guidance for fundraisers are as robust as they can be.” [Note to UK fundraisers: Peter Lewis’ statement also includes illustrations of how the ‘Code of Fundraising Practice’ might be applied in Mrs. Cooke’s case.]

Almost before the ink was dry on the newspapers’ screaming headlines my inbox dinged with valuable words of wisdom and insight from veteran fundraising consultant Giles Pegram.

Giles succinctly noted: “It [the Cooke incident] was truly an accident waiting to happen.”  And he noted that the incident raises and will raise a number of issues:

• The use of list rentals
• The use of reciprocal (‘exchange’ for our North American readers) mailings
• The unrelenting use of scripts by tele-fundraising agencies
• The use of tele-fundraising for cold recruitment/acquisition
• The use of up-front premiums in many acquisition packages. (“I received one”, Giles noted, “from a household name charity … which included a pen, address labels, cards to send friends, etc. Even I felt guilty about putting it in the bin.”)

Giles went on to advise against over-reacting and protesting with the usual noisy “yes, but…” This sort of self-serving defense he warns “could destroy our good relationships with millions of donors”.

AND THEN… a warning and some very sound advice:

“This is a milestone in fundraising practice. Let’s read again Ken Burnett’s ‘Why and how fundraising has to change’ and re-consider, seriously, urgently, as a sector how to turn the latest headline into a new covenant with donors.” [You can find a link to Ken’s series on the need for change and the Agitator’s summary of it here.]

Of course, I suspect few in our sector will stop, think, and take this latest signal of the urgent need for re-examination and change seriously.

I’m continually surprised at how few nonprofit leaders and their top managers understand the public’s — and yes, donors’ too — ambivalence about the nonprofit world. As a general rule there’s a thin line between tolerance of our world, specifically as it relates to fundraising practices, and resentment toward it.

You can see the pent up resentment burst forth in the case of Mrs. Cooke. As the reporter notes, “She had 27 direct debits and was receiving 260 begging letters a month” while her name was shared among charities and telemarketers.

As sure as the sun rose this morning and as you read this there are telemarketers, face-to-face folks, premium vendors and the charity fundraising managers who contract with them figuring out how dodge this bullet.

On this Monday morning there will be even more signs of denial and avoidance than there are numbers of resumes and CVs being updated: “Yes, but” … “Mrs. Cooke wasn’t (was) in our database” … “Everyone else does it” … “We couldn’t have known” … “We have no other choice”.

What is so tragic is that the telemarketers, the over-zealous face-to-face solicitors and the burn-and-churn direct mailers will be blamed. But they’re simply following orders.

The real blame for why the public increasingly mistrusts us, why charities sit atop a very thin knife blade – praise one day; condemnation the next — lies with fundraising managers at the top, the CEOs and their boards. They know better, or they certainly should.

They know that fundraising must change. And yet they whistle past the graveyard persisting in the belief their charities are loved and adored. How many Monday morning stories like Mrs. Cooke’s does it take?

The reality is that until those top level fundraising managers, CEOs and Boards — whose unthinking, driven-by-short-term-budget-madness, make-the-numbers-work-at-any-cost and the donor-be-damned mindsets — are exposed and driven from our sector, the change that’s needed will never come.

Three years ago I ended that Monday post with: “Each of these stories is a sad commentary on how some – in the name of ‘money’, ‘technique’, ‘that’s the way it works’ rationalizations — have turned their backs on the donor. And now, we’ll all pay the price. As well we should.”

As well we should.

Roger