Olive Cooke: Five years’ on – what have we learned, and how can the sector move forward?

By Adrian Sargeant, co-Director of the Institute for Sustainable Philanthropy

It has been five and a half years since the tragic death of Olive Cooke. Most fundraisers will remember the media furore that erupted in the months immediately following her death, when it was revealed she had been receiving close on 3000 mailings from charities in the course of a typical year. Family and friends noted that she had been upset and distressed by the volume of organisations constantly asking her for money. It turned out that Mrs Cooke had been supporting around 100 charities, and a quarter of those had swapped her details with others (FRSB 2016).

List swaps, or reciprocals as they were known, were commonplace prior to 2015 and justified on the basis of the return on investment they were able to generate, at least in the short term. Even in the peak of reciprocal popularity, many realised that the economic argument was significantly weaker than it first appeared. As lifetime value (post swop) decreased, charities found themselves giving away good legacy prospects and of course the postbag of discontent began to grow.

Following a highly critical report by Sir Stuart Etherington, the creation of a new regulator and the stalwart efforts of experienced charity leaders in the creation of the Commission on the Donor Experience, the sector promised to do better.

Yet how far have we really come? There can be little doubt that improvements have been made to professional practice; we are now taking greater care of the vulnerable, fundraising has become less intrusive, complaints about fundraising remain low and the much trumpeted Fundraising Preference Service is now withering from lack of use. Good.

But much remains to be done. For sure, individual fundraisers care immensely about the experience of donors, but the same may not always be said of those who control the purse strings. How can I say that with confidence? Because the metrics organisations use to assess fundraising are still all about the money. Very few charities measure the quality of the donor experience, and how giving makes donors feel or contributes to their sense of wellbeing. Almost no-one rewards their fundraisers for improvements in any of these latter relationship metrics, so financial measures continue to dominate.

It is hard to develop a greater degree of donor focus or to build meaningful donor relationships if one doesn’t understand the impact that fundraising can have on them. For some in our sector, donor centricity has become merely an exercise in swapping pronouns, switching to use “you” rather than “we” in our solicitations, newsletters and the like. Yet to add genuine value for supporters we need to understand more about the “you” and what would engage, excite and reward that “you” at different stages in a relationship.

We are also fascinated by technique in the sense that we will grab at the latest idea and assess it only against what it can achieve for the organization, NOT what it can achieve and make donors like Mrs Cooke feel. To take one example, the language of behavioural economics has crept into the fundraising lexicon, with little attempt to determine how the use of these techniques might make people feel.

Consider the mock-up of a solicitation below. I am using this example because I’m beginning to see the idea borrowed by multiple charities. Doubtless if it is tested against a control it will boost the average gift size and persuade more respondents to give at the £20 level. Behavioural economics does work, I have no issue with its underpinning science. It is robust and proven. But ask yourself how you just made someone who can only afford to give £10 feel? What emotions will they experience if they give AND if they do not?

And why was it necessary to make them feel this way? The justification becomes the same as that used for reciprocals. We do it because it raises more money, at least in the short term.

Rather, we might have selected words that would make everyone reading the response slip feel good about themselves, and radically, feel good about themselves whether they chose to make a gift today or not. The strongest relationships we experience as human beings are built on mutual and unconditional love. Yet so often the love we articulate in fundraising is conditional. Conditional on giving and conditional on giving at a certain level.

Why not tell them how we feel about them now, before they make a donation and even if they don’t? Why not celebrate who they are and who they are in our relationship? Why not tell them how much they already mean to us? All these routes can grow giving and our experimental work has shown, double giving. But none of them exclude people from these good feelings or run the risk of making people feel bad. How we make people feel should be our primary focus, and if we get that right, then the money will follow. But the converse is not always true. Focusing on the money will not in itself lead to more fulfilling and loving relationships. It may even harm them.  

Putting the experience of the donor at the core of what we do involves much more than the swopping of pronouns, or even responding to individual preferences and interests (although of course we should do that). The experience that donors should receive is a loving experience. It is the language of love, not the language of sales or finance that should define who we are and how we choose to behave. If the love articulated by Mrs Cooke had been genuinely mutual, her experience of giving could have been very different.

As we start out on a new year, let’s think more deeply about what it means to be donor centric - and the relationship between fundraising and the love that should be at the core of philanthropy. Let’s also stop borrowing technique from other sectors that care little for love. Let’s focus instead on what we ourselves are well placed to do best; the building of deeper, more fulfilling relationships, that can grow the human capacity to love others. That should be the real purpose of fundraising.