#47 279 out of 280 cannot be wrong… can they?

In a week where Scentre reveal a ban on acquisition, including charitable f2f, in their highly regarded Westfield shopping centres, and the Federal Court dismisses APPCO's attempt to have the class-action heard as separate cases, I am flying to the UK for a couple of weeks and don't have the time to discuss it with you. Instead, I have a pre-prepared article about how great f2f fundraising is. It may not be timely, but it is deserved.

More people have signed up to become regular givers in 2017 than any of the past four years according to the PFRA 2017 annual report.

343,389 new donors joined the ranks of other change makers through PFRA registered F2F agencies and in-house teams. If we offer a generous 1 in 5 ratio for pledges versus people asked we can conservatively say that there were 1.7 million conversations about our favourite causes on the streets, doors and private sites of Australia.

This means that 1 in 10 of the adult population (aged 21-75) stopped to speak with fundraisers.

These numbers really do speak to the reach of face-to-face and back up the claim that it is a channel without equal for mass-communication. Furthermore, with an estimated 6,750 complaints from all PFRA members over a year we can only receive one complaint for every 280 conversations (0.38%).

At times, the media paint face-to-face as a nuisance and a scourge of the high street, but with these figures we can state that we are a lot more popular than we are given credit for. It is true that we still have some way to go before we can say, with hand on heart, that we are always our best selves, but these numbers are encouraging.