Donor abuse is rife in the sector

Howard Lake | 3 July 2007 | Blogs

There was an article last week in UK Fundraising, in which it was reported that “The charity sector is one of the worst offenders at misusing and abusing marketing lists according to a new study. The annual survey by data value management specialists DQM Group says that the charity sector now features among the top five worst offenders.”It appears that we have slipped hugely in just one year. This seems to chime in with the fact that many charities are reporting slipping response rates – with Tim Hunter announcing that DM is dead! I suspect that what we are doing is what we always do when things get a little tricky: we keep pressing the buttons until enough money dribbles out of the system, so that we hit our short term targets.
But what sort of damage does that do to our long term relationships with those donors? I’m reminded of the scientific experiments they carried out on rats in the 1970s, when they wired up their pleasure centre, the hypothalamus, so that each time the rat pressed a button it would have an orgasm. The net result was that the rats climaxed to death.
That’s what we seem to do to our donors – we keep pressing that button, squeezing more and more out of them until they keel over and die.
When the goin gets tough, and response rates go down is the very time we should be investing in our existing donors and caring for them. Now is the time to give them that extra little something to make them feel that you really care – not yet another reminder mailing asking for even more money.
How long ago was Ken Burnett preaching that simple mantra of donor care? And yet we still see much more evidence of “couldn’t care” rather than donor care. Come on guys, let’s sharpen up our act and be in the top five next year.

About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale. He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.