Earlier this afternoon, as I stood waiting in front of a cashpoint, a young guy in his 20s thrust a blood-covered arm under my nose and asked for a couple of quid. It was a shocking sight on a raw winter’s day and, before I could help it, I had fumbled the money into his hand.

A second later I kicked myself, I knew this was a well worn routine. A small, self-inflicted wound will generate an impressive amount of blood – enough to horrify passers-by into putting their hands into their pockets. I’d seen it before. One evening last year, when I was parking my car, another young man emerged from the darkness with what looked like mortal wounds and a story about being beaten up. I gave him a fiver. A couple of days later I bumped into the same guy with the same story. I asked for my fiver back and he ran.

You have to admit though, when it comes to asking for money, these guys know what they’re doing. They’re getting cash out of a tough old cynic like me, who regularly turns down timid, bumbling asks from charities.

When Rachel, Adam and I were talking about founding beautiful world, nearly two years ago, we all agreed that a lot of fundraisers seemed embarrassingly poor at asking for money. It was almost as if it was a shameful thing to do.

Today an article in Third Sector announced that the ‘Sector is bad at asking for cash’. It’s now official. According to a report from Funding the Future, “a £10m sector-wide campaign is needed to help them (charities) get better at it”. Wow, they’re certainly going to need to be good at asking for money!

Fiona Ellis, chair of the Funding Commission, said: “Perhaps it’s a British trait, but fundraisers are shy when it comes to asking for money. They don’t ask for a long time, and then they ask badly.” She’s right in a lot of cases, but wrong to tar the whole sector with the same brush.

In another Third Sector article Institute of Fundraising chief executive Amanda McLean responded that the Funding Commission’s statement about how charities ask for donations is, “clearly wrong”, because, “fundraisers bring in hundreds of millions of pounds to the sector.”

But could they bring in more?  There’s barely a charity we’ve come across that couldn’t get better results by making even small changes.

We often see a conflict of interests between fundraisers who feel the need to tell the worst case scenario and the desire of others within the charity not to portray their ‘clients’ in a downbeat way. The result is a sort of half ask.

We also regularly come across charities struggling with the fact that they have been fundraising for years on a story which is no longer an accurate representation of what the charity does, or the problems faced by the people it helps. People aren’t likely to be all that forgiving if they find that their hard earned cash isn’t actually being used as suggested and they tend not to give again.

There was a character round Shoreditch known as ‘doner kebab man’ who used to tour the pubs and ask for money for the doner-kebab-fund with a cheeky grin – on the whole people gave in to his charm. (He even did a split test once, between doner kebabs and pizzas – the kebabs won.)  There is plenty to be learned from him when it comes to getting people to give.

There is little question that the sector as a whole needs to learn to ask in a more upfront way. It needs to get its stories straight as well. We don’t need to be shy about asking. We do need to be charming, clever, inspiring, heart-felt, inventive and deserving.

Tags: Charities, Charity, Fundraising