Life and times of a fundraiser - Intro

as well as working on Scope (seen below), ive also worked on Marie Curie and British heart foundation. All are huge charities in the UK.

The UK charity sector is worth about £39 billion ($53 billion) at time of writing, with two-thirds of the UK donating an average of £16 a month. To put it into perspective, the charity sector is larger than the automotive industry and adds more to the economy than the agriculture industry... and for the last four months it’s my job to convince people to donate EVEN MORE, it’s not easy.

As a kid I thought door to door fundraisers were volunteers, doing it in their spare time out of the goodness of their own hearts... I couldn’t have been more wrong – many are exceedingly talented salespeople! But you have to be good at sales to turn up at someone’s door and convince them to hand over their bank details, signatures and contact details to a stranger and pay a monthly fee in return for pretty much nothing. Going back to what I said before – I thought chuggers (door to door fundraisers) did it for free; I soon found out that many of the experienced full time fundraisers were on about £30000($40000)/pa, not to mention bonuses… there was a fundraiser there who’d been doing it for about 3 years, and he was as good as they get; we were expected to get 2 signups a day, his personal best was 27 in a day – he made £4700 that week!

Truth be told, the job isn’t for everyone, we have to brave the cold harsh winters and work till 9 pm in the rain – oftentimes with rude people slamming doors in our faces. And only a select few actually reach huge bonuses like the one mentioned previously. Unsurprisingly, we have a staff turnover rate of about 50 people a month (some leave, some are fired for causing too much loss or being inappropriate in charity gear). So, you’re probably wondering why I’ve stayed for four months? The answer is not a simple one.

It’s not as if I didn’t have other work opportunities, there was one point where I got another job in the Fenwick’s toy department, but it was shite. You see, I’d be sat there, behind the counter with my shit eating grin in overdrive, doing exactly the same thing over and over again like some kind of robot, for hours on end. I just wanted to mix things up, I was trying to sell extra stuff to these poor parents, just from sheer boredom. So I left. Best move ever :).

I previously mentioned people being 'innapropriate in charity gear', by this i mean shagging, drinking, smoking and swearing... the company i work for, hire a lot of people, so it makes sense that a few crazy people get in. Like the guy who had sex with donors so often that he got too cocky and stripped off infront of a lass who filmed it and called her mates to beat him up in the street (we never saw him again). Another time, one of the guys was flirting with a girl on the door, it turns out her boyfriend had just been released from the mental health ward that day, he was a paranoid schizophrenic with anger issues - needles to say, a fundraiser was chased down the street and beaten, and a crazy man was incarcerated.

So I suppose part of what keeps me fundraising, is that every day something new happens, you’re in a new neighbourhood with different people and you have to read them and adapt your pitch to them. I like a challenge, if you know me, I can be quietly competitive, so secretly i am always trying to score more than my teammates! And it is truly rewarding, because I know I’ve worked my ass off to scale an amazingly steep learning curve. In the quest to be better at my job, I constantly improve everything from the way I talk, to body language, to my choice of words, to confidence and humour – and I know it’ll serve me well in the long run, that’s why I stayed.

Please let me know if you’d be interested in hearing some of my outrageous stories and adventures across the north of England as a fundraiser in more detail!