A cut above

As you can see from my picture, I don’t wear funky glasses. Or black polo necks. I don’t even have a pony tail.

What a rubbish creative director I must be, you’re thinking. 

But, not having a pony tail does have its advantages: it means I get hair cuts. Which in turn means I hear stories like the one my hairdresser told me on Saturday.

As I sat there sipping a cappuccino full of my own hair, she told me how she'd been walking through one of Cheltenham’s two shopping arcades (we’re so spoilt) when a bloke thrust a large bottle of dirty brown water in her face.

“Would you drink this?” he asked her.

“No, I wouldn’t!” she replied.

“Ah, let me talk to you...” he continued.

He was a face-to-facer from Christian Aid.

He told her about people in the developing world who have no choice but to drink dirty water, teeming with cholera bacteria.

And he signed her up for £8 a month.

Pretty impressive, huh? I certainly thought so.

It’s impressive that Christian Aid are bringing the problem and the need for what they do, to life in such a simple and dramatic way.

And it’s pretty impressive of Helen (my 25 year-old hairdresser) to give £8 a month.

Plus, it also made me realise that some of the standing orders I have for charities are for less than £8 a month, and I really ought to increase them. So her charity has inspired further charity, as is often the way.

So, it really is the season of goodwill to all men and hairdressers.

It got me thinking in another way too: how Helen’s story is also the embodiment of a fundraising fairytale. One many of us have heard, but worth re-telling at Christmas.

It goes something like this:

Once upon a time, a long time ago, charities recruited new donors using DRTV, press ads with coupons, mailings, inserts and doordrops.

But then one day, someone discovered something new. 'Face to face.'

You stopped someone in the street and had a conversation with them. It had two benefits: firstly, it gave you the chance to tell someone much more of the story – the reason to donate – than you could in a 90 second TV ad. And secondly, it was much harder to say ‘no’ to a person than the TV.

And lo! a new form of fundraising was born.
 
Although some of the face-to-face people who stopped you were a bit full-on. These big bad wolves were known as ‘chuggers’ – charity muggers.

But apart from them, everything seemed lovely. Deep and crisp and even.

Except... three things started to happen.

Firstly, the chuggers gave the whole industry a bad name – annoying, rather than engaging their audience.

Secondly, many of the people who’d been recruited face-to-face started to lapse, much sooner than donors recruited through other media did.

And thirdly, many of the people who’d been recruited face-to-face turned out to be completely unresponsive to any further contact, utterly ignoring appeals to give an extra cash gift or increase their monthly donation.

Presumably because many of them were 25 year-old hairdressers. 

An audience a charity wouldn’t normally target in a gazillion years.

But there is a 'happily ever after' to the fairytale.

Towards the end of the Noughties, as we approached the... what’s the next decade called, the Tensies? – charities and their agencies began working together on integrated, insightful acquisition campaigns once more.

Like the one Tangible did this year for a charity which brought them 54,000 new donors. 54,000 donors who were all recruited through direct marketing, and so who are much more likely to continue to respond to direct marketing, massively increasing their lifetime value.

So, Merry Christmas one and all.

And here’s hoping Santa brings me one of those fabulous black polo necks.