Adam said:if the chuggers we spoke to had behaved well, abided by the law, and kept obeyed their own professional code, there would be no story.

So if your hypothesis had been disproven (or not supported by your own research), you would not have issued a press release saying 'F2F is better than we thought', you would have just buried it. Or perhaps gone on until you inevitably found some that did support your prejudice. That's appalling...

Ian makes an excellent point. As has been conceded, it was a minority of the fundraisers that IG encountered problems with.

IG's charitable objects include 'promotion of public confidence in charities' and 'promotion of charitable giving', and this research (or rather, the presentation of the results) would on the face of it seemed to have achieved exactly the opposite.

Whilst people were encouraged to give online, inevitably that message hasn't filtered through to the press coverage, because of the way that IG presented the information.

It's a question of proportionality.

Does the degree and amount of wrongdoing you uncovered in your untrustworthy research warrant the punitive measure of a total public boycott, as you have called for? Is that a proportionate response?

If the answer to that question is yes, fine Adam, have a good night's kip.

If the answer is no, and a more proportionate response would have been to have called for increased training, say, as Meh and other have suggested, then you were wrong to ask the public to boycott F2F and any consequences that come from that are your responsibility. If you don't have a few pangs of guilt about that, you should.

You say: "Once again, I repeat: if the chuggers we spoke to had behaved well, abided by the law, and kept obeyed their own professional code, there would be no story."

Most of them did, so you played up the negative aspects as much as possible for their PR value. I was a journalist for 18 years, so I know there are lots of different 'stories' in the same event. You chose one particular 'story' to promote to the media.

Charities and F2F companies need to, and will, take responsibility for addressing the failings you uncovered in your research. You however, need to accept responsibility for any consequences that result from how you chose to promulgate it. You had options. You made a choice. Stand up and accept responsibility for your actions.

There is a direct line of causation between you calling for a public boycott of chuggers and Kelvin McKenzie endorsing that claim. Wherever that line takes us next, it will always start with you because were the one who first called for the boycott.

You cannot escape this.

So you're far too busy to respond to the really important issues re. the boycott call but can reply on the comparatively minor points regarding:

- the use of the baby image;
- clarifying that that you weren't literally calling street fundraisers muggers (thanks for that!);
- something or other about you being a history graduate?

You did respond in an elliptical and unsatisfactory fashion about why you called for a boycott - an response which raised more questions that it answers.

You may not feel it very important but justifying why you were so ready to pull the trigger in calling for a boycott would seem to me one of the most important things you could be doing right now - not communicating this impacts on the credibility of your organization, yourself and of the other people working there. Certainly it would seem more important than updating your twitter feed.

So here is the question once more:

Why did you consider calling for a boycott preferable to calling for a number of alternative measures (greater regulation/ training/ encouragement of use of in-house fundraisers) that would appear to address the concerns that you raise satisfactorily?

A follow-up question(I don't want to push it so just answer the above if you really need to get back to twitter):

Does the fact that you now welcome increased training and have couched your request in more ambivalent terms elsewhere suggest that you recognise that this was a dispropoportionate response to the failings highlighted by your research?

To be honest, this feels like a Michael Howard/ Jeremy Paxman kind of moment!

Please, please, please answer this question - I promise I'll go away when you've provided the rest of the world with any kind of rationale for your decision.

Go on. Pleeeeeeeeeeease.

Please?

Hi Adam

On the issue of comparability. I recognise you aren't at liberty to compare the disclosure of face2face with internet donations but there is a wider issue of comparability.

In your advice to the public you compared chugging to an alternative - giving online. This is not a valid comparison as one method is a way of fundraising and the other is a channel of 'fund-receiving'. That isn't a legitimate comparison.

If your advice to charities was to actually fundraise online, which it should have been as this thread indicates, then we only have a few case-studies for comparison. The one that springs to mind is the WSPA campaign which won the best use of digital award at the IOF. I think the details of how succesful it was are avaialble on various charity press websites and hope they won't mind me using it to make the point.

WSPA had to deliver over 280 million impressions to generate less than 7,000 donors at an ask level of £3 and while they may or may not have recorded a positive ROI the work, resources and effort in delivering such a campaign are substantial, notwithstadning the need for an online marketing company, an affiliate broker and internal specialists.

Do you have any insights into online fundraising that can feasibly offer the same reach and effect that you can therefore offer as the sector may feel rather hamstrung by your actions this week?

I did listen by the way to your webinar and this was really not about fundraising but fund-receiving.

Ian, much though I appreciate your thoughtful remarks, trying to make me feel guilty simply isn't going to work. Let's remind ourselves of the facts:

1. Some of the chuggers we spoke to broke the law. That's not OK, and that's also not my fault.

2. A sizeable minority of the chuggers we spoke to broke their own professional code. That's also not OK, and it's also not my fault.

I want to be crystal clear at this point, because I think the important facts of this debate are getting lost in a thicket of discussion about online fundraising and how much IG raises from this website. Once again, I repeat: if the chuggers we spoke to had behaved well, abided by the law, and kept obeyed their own professional code, there would be no story.

Ian, if you want to blame anyone for the situation we're in now, blame the chugging companies and the charities which employed them. They brought it on themselves.

Adam, Intelligent Giving

OK - thanks Adam. It is a shame you are prepared to use your resources to find that information out particularly as you can decide how to use the resources you have and don't answer to donors or beneficiaries. Could you at least give a broad estimation; less than £100? More than £1000?

If the website isn't your primary source of income how are IG funded? Is it primarily from one individual or organisation? What fundraising activities do you do towards the public other than via the website?

HIstory lesson

Adam, you haven't been in this sector as long as some of us so you probably don't recall - perhaps you don't even know about – the events of Christmas 2003 in Scotland.

Following two fundraising scandals, one genuine, one misunderstood and misreported by the media, a columnist for the Daily Record, using language not dissimilar to that used by Kelvin McKenzie, called on the Scottish public to boycott all fundraisers.

And they did. Charitable giving in Scotland crashed almost overnight: not direct debits (chugging, DM etc) but cash collections by volunteers on the high street were decimated. Jobs and, more importantly, services for beneficiaries, faced being cut. The situation was rescued only by the superhuman efforts of a group of Scottish fundraisers who devised and implemented an unprecedented and yet-to-be repeated public awareness campaign.

The Daily Record columnist proved to the the tipping point and, far from only preaching to the converted, he persuaded a lot of people with neutral views about charity fundraising not to give.

If the public follow your call and boycott street fundraisers en masse, with resultant loss of income and cuts in services to beneficiaries, not to mention redundancies at charities, you WILL be personally responsible. It's now far too late for you to distance yourself from others who are taking up the messages and clarion call that a few days ago you were proudly trumpeting yourself.

I think that perhaps its beginning to dawn on you
a) just how much influence you have
b) how irresponsibly you have been wielding it.

You are the one who lit the fuse Adam. You can't pretend it's not your fault when the bomb goes off.

If the public did boycott chuggers, would you be proud of your achievement Adam? Would you sleep soundly this Christmas?

Mikemuses: This site wasn't designed to be primarily a fundraising mechanism, and it probably never will raise all the cash we need to keep running. So yes, you're right. But you've missed the point.

ChrisA: I don't have the figures to hand at the moment, and finding them out would take some time (because I'd have to check with Justgiving, our bank, and our internal Gift Aid reconciliation). So I'm afraid I can't answer your question, because doing so wouldn't be an effective use of IG's resources. Chuggers, on the other hand are legally required to give disclosure of their income. So the two situations aren't comparable at all.

Adam, Intelligent Giving

Appreciate it may take some time to answer the questions put to you regarding IG's online income but will you answer them? I'm sure you'll appreciate the irony of not getting an answer upon request when you found it so difficult with your recent research.

"IG's donors, trustees and the majority of our visitors expect me to keep this website running"

And given the income from it, that surely can't be a very efficient form of fundraising, can it?

A few small points:

1. Meh: I'm not responding to all the points here because I just don't have the time. IG's donors, trustees and the majority of our visitors expect me to keep this website running - and that means that I, unfortunately, can't spend all day on this thread - much though I'd like to!

2. Chris: If you're trying to hold me accountable for the actions of Kelvin Mackenzie, I think that presumes that I have far more power than I actually do! Frankly, I don't think Kelvin's blunt points are going to entice anyone who doesn't already agree with him to change their mind: I think columnists of such strident opinions almost exclusively confirm the existing prejudices of their readers. That said, I certainly don't agree with Kelvin's argument - but I would say (again) that if chuggers had abided by their own professional code, then there would be no IG Chugging Survey, and no Kelvin column. It really is that simple.

Adam, Intelligent Giving

Well, the coupling of the image with the articles implied that you are calling the charities who complain cry babies. Apologies if I inferred this incorrectly but you might want to consider the way that this plays to those of us who don't regualarly visit your website.

Anyway, you've again cherry-picked one minor comment to respond to ignoring the many others. I guess you're not responding to the others because you can't.

I'm sure IG will be delighted to see that Kelvin McKenzie has jumped on board.

In his column (Sun) today he says with regard to street fundraisers (he does, of course, call them chuggers): "The Taliban would be proud of them". And also: "Charity watchdog Intelligent Giving, which conducted the mystery shopper survey, said almost all chuggers may be breaking the law. It is calling on the public to boycott them and force them off the streets".

Adam: despite your protestations that you have briefed journalists correctly, you must have been aware of the line that the press would be likely to take. Either this was a deliberate attempt to damage charities, or you are incredibly naive.

Holy cow, this truly beggars belief:

"We justify calling for a boycott on the simple grounds that chuggers cost a lot of money to employ, compared to putting a 'donate' button on a website. From a donor's point of view, therefore, giving direct over a website is more efficient than giving to a chugger".

Based on this theory we'd all pack up and wait hopefully for floods of legacies from informed or 'intelligent' donors. After all, legacy income is generaly considered to be the most cost efficient income stream of all..... Trouble is it's unreliable and, if you've got an ageing database (as many charities have), it's going to taper off over time.

Still, who cares if you don't bring in enough money to keep the operation going (sod the beneficiaries) just so long as you keep your hands clean by avoiding the less efficient forms of the 'dark art'.

To draw a rather timely parallel; when and if you next see a pension adviser they'll probably suggest you consider mixing between high risk/high yield investments and lower risk/lower yield ones.... I'm yet to be given the advice: 'find the nicest looking basket and stick all your eggs in it, chances are you'll be fine."

Fundraisers and fundraising departments are entrusted with modest expenditure budgets to hit short term income targets, but they must also guarentee organisationial sustainability in the medium/long term. It's not a simple case of finding what seems to work and then doing more of it. Uou have to diversify to balance short term sucess with long term security.

Don't shoot the messenger

We've used pictures of babies on this site for years, so the fact one pops up on the blog shouldn't come as a surprise to regular visitors. Why we use babies, however, is a bit of a mystery to me - I think our visual designer thought they looked pretty.

Adam, Intelligent Giving

Hang on! I've just seen that you've illustrated your article on charity complaints about your 'research' with a picture of a baby?

And you're telling me that you're not treating them with disdain?

How can you seriously believe that you are "try[ing] to help the fundraising profession improve" when you appear to be spending so much effort to alienate those in the profession and where you appear to have completely failed to grasp the concerns that these alleged beneficiaries have raised? I see elsewhere that you rather patronisingly refer to Ian Macquillan’s comments as “the most coherent criticism”, tacitly implying that all the others have not been coherent. How can being so antagonistic and dismissive have any positive value in a profession that you claim to be trying to improve?

I don’t know why you are taking such a snarky approach - no doubt, the concerns you discovered are legitimate but the conclusions (boycott F2F) and mode of advocacy (polemical/ childishly argumentative) are inexplicable. Your enthusiasm for name-calling and reluctance to engage will, I think, affect the success of your report and the sustainability and reputation of your organization. I can’t see any value in it.

I think that’s irresponsible. What is even more irresponsible, however, is the call for a boycott. I’d like to invite you again to explain why calling for abolition was an appropriate course of action rather than instead call for a number of alternative other measures that would appear to address the concerns that you raise satisfactorily. I’ve noted that you appear to be back-tracking from this call in welcoming increased training for fundraisers – I wonder whether you have the maturity to recognise that a boycott is a disproportionate response and the logic behind it incoherent. Judging by the way you’ve behaved this far, I doubt it.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

A Hindu friend of mine commented to me once that the English have a cultural "thing" about saying no. His theory was that this worked fine while there was a matching inhibition about requests (think of all the convoluted variations on, "Could you possibly put me through to Mr Smith?"). Remove the inhibitions on the requests and all hell breaks loose. Initially people carry on saying yes, even when they don't want to, but after a point they get angry enough to say no (but they don't do this until they are REALLY angry).

Anything that prevents money reaching a charity is surely a bad thing? I dont think boycotting charities will acheive anything

"We justify calling for a boycott on the simple grounds that chuggers cost a lot of money to employ, compared to putting a 'donate' button on a website. From a donor's point of view, therefore, giving direct over a website is more efficient than giving to a chugger".

This strengthens my point that you don't seem to be listening to what the fundraisers on this blog are saying - that website donations are unpredictable compared to street fundraising*and that street fundraising reaches a constituency that on-line fundraising cannot. It's not a like-for-like comparison.

Oh - and doesn't the fact that you've had such little success in raising funds on-line call into question your conclusion that it is an acceptable alternative?

Moving on, you say that one positive outcome is that the charities say that they will "tighten up their training" - how is that positive if the boycott you call for is in place and no one will give money to these street fundraisers (no matter how well trained they are)?

Let me re-visit the original question:

How do you proceed from your research which shows that some fundraisers violate the code (while conceding that in-house personnel do the job better) and conclude that all chuggers should be boycotted? You're thus excluding any other means of improving situation (such as the increased training that you welcome)...

This is what I don't understand and would appreciate an answer on. You appear to be conceding that there are other potential positive outcomes which makes me wonder why you have made such an extreme call in the first place?

* How about this for an alternative to 'chugging'? And, no, I obviously wasn't saying that you are describing them literally as muggers. Thanks for the straw man though!

Sorry Adam I should have clarified; could you give the figures to question 1 as a figure (£) and to 2 as a percentage (%). As I'm sure you'll imagine 'virtually nothing' could mean anything from £10,000 to £50,000 and it doens't provide your donors with any context.

Thanks

To answer both questions at once: virtually nothing.

Adam, Intelligent Giving

Adam

You were asked on this forum to disclose how much income you generated online and you have not provided an answer to this question which I think is unfair as a charity that promotes accountability and openess with potential donors particularly with regards to you advice given to the public this week.

Please could you do the following (without adding commentary or potential bias so people on the forum can draw independent conclusions):

1. detail the amount you have raised online since assuming charitable status

(please if possible could you subtract donations from trustees or those connected with your organisation)

2. declare what percentage that online constitutes towards IG's overall income?

Thanks in advance

I've responded to Ian's points on his blog: http://is.gd/9fR5

Adam, Intelligent Giving

OK, we justify calling for a boycott on the simple grounds that chuggers cost a lot of money to employ, compared to putting a 'donate' button on a website. From a donor's point of view, therefore, giving direct over a website is more efficient than giving to a chugger.

I'm not saying charities should raise all their cash online. That would be a silly thing to say. But I am saying that if you have a choice, as a donor, giving online is better.

Your other points:

1. You, and other people, might find the term 'chugger' offensive, but it's far preferable to the long and jargon-y 'face-to-face fundraiser', in our opinion. It's also a widely recognized term. We don't mean to suggest that charities actually employ genuine muggers, because that's obviously nonsense.

2. We're not driven by disdain for anything. In fact, we try to help the fundraising profession improve, and have given up a substantial amount of our time and money to this cause - for instance, when we ran an hour-long webinar giving advice to charities on how best to use social media in their fundraising last month.

In terms of having an impact, I'd point out that many of the charities we criticized in this research have already said they'll tighten up their training of chuggers as a result of our work. Which is good news for everyone.

Adam, Intelligent Giving

Adam, are you certain none of the people your people spoke to were volunteers?

Its not as if volunteers are prevented from doing face to face fundraising.
Do you know for certain they were employed?

Martin

It's true that the comments don't appear to have been editorialised - however, some of the questions have been skirted around (e.g. picking up on the 'history graduates' comments in an e-mail while ignoring the other more pertinent and sensible issues raised by the poster).

The question that I still haven't seen answered is:
- How do you justify calling for a boycott?

Two other points:

i) I think the use of the term 'charity muggers' is pretty rude and indicative of a partial approach;

ii) Looking at your other work, it seems to be driveb by disdain for the fundraising sector nor do you seem to make much effort to engage with it. This article does not recognise the reasons that charity fundraisers use street fundraising - implying that they are too stupid/ shortsighted to make the shift to web-based fundraising. Your failure to recognise the reasons cited behind F2F's use nor suggest any credible alternatives means that your message is less like to influence.

You would have far more impact if you made recommendations that recognise the concerns and priorities of the fundraising sector and based your recommendations on more convincing research.

Moreover, failure to engage with the sector you have set yourselves up to police seems like a strategy that is unlikely to have much positive impact. The patronising approach you are perceived to have limits your ability to achieve change in the sector even further.

If I saw any charity carrying out advocacy in this way, I'd be extremely unlikely to give them any money.

To clarify: I'm not a chugger, fundraiser nor work for a charity - I've taken an interest in this story because I was shocked by the vitriol about street fundraisers that has appeared in the comments on the Guardian story on this.

The whole disclosure statement issue was only part of what I meant when I said you had sexed up this report.

You have sexed this up because:

You had preconceived ideas about what the research would deliver. You admit as much on the video interview with Howard Lake. You put together a survey with inbuilt bias (value-laden terms such as 'harassment levels') and then sent your own staff, not an independent research company, into the field with preconceived ideas about what they would find. This is astonishingly bad market research practice.

When the research failed to deliver the levels of harassment and impoliteness you expected, as you confirm in your interview with Howard, you resorted to secondary indicators of harassment such as failure to terminate the contact. However, many of the chuggers you flagged in this way scored 2 on your harassment scale, which is not very high, so you have an internal contradiction in the data.

Rather than draw an unbiased conclusion from the raw data, you appear to have forced the data to fit your long-held corporate position about F2F fundraising. You then took the worst case scenario findings to the media and downplayed the positive aspects because the positive aspects would not have got you such media coverage.

That is why I say this research was sexed up.

And, with respect Adam, it is entirely your fault that the story was presented this way in the media. They were your claims based on your own 'scientific' (your words) research. You went to the media and told them that chuggers were breaking the law. The fact that you briefed them in the verbal small print that your research didn't actually back up the headline claims you were making does not absolve you of responsibility. They are journalists and go for the best headlines; you are supposed to be a responsible commentator on this sector.

You have made a serious error in conducting and promoting this flawed and amateurish research and I think you should admit it.

The simple fact you posted multiple, very defensive responses on this article, speaks volumes about the shoddiness of your reporting and ‘research’. We see your desperate scrabbling for that ever so distant credibility shrinking further and further away from you.

If you claim you’re not professional researchers, you should probably stop claiming you are presenting ‘research’. If you can’t design a good survey, conduct it in a professional way then you are not entitled to call your flawed findings research. You claim face to face fundraisers are unprofessional? I think you should look at your own practices first. This is extremely poor form and you should be ashamed of yourself and your particularly unprofessional organization.

I am failing to understand why anyone should donate to IG. Your donors have just spent their hard earned cash on some very poor program delivery. When I donate to charity, I like to see my money spent efficiently and effectively. IG has done neither. If you are not professional researchers and would like to present some research, I suggest you set some fundraising targets, achieve them and contract research out to someone who is a professional. At least to someone who has a statistics degree from a reputable university. Not someone with an arts degree and misplaced, good intentions, a statistics degree!

In the world we live in where everyone wants to take a little more money from you, they all seem equally annoying. The jerk at the shoe shop who tries to up-sell you some accessories or the waiter who keeps asking if you want some sides and charges you for ‘complimentary’ bread or the cold calling call center staff trying to offload insurance, holidays or a home loan. They are all annoying but you smile, thank them for their offer and you walk away. There will always be rogues in any industry but you are attacking the one with nothing to fall back on. The loss of the public’s trust and confidence will sink a charity and their beneficiaries. Their reputation is the only thing of value charities have to trade upon. It is why people trust and believe in them. You trash a few rogues a charity accidentally hires, and you trash the whole charity and their beneficiaries.

Get over it IG.

"All I'm saying is that, from a donor's perspective, giving online is more efficient than giving to a chugger."

But that's not all you're saying is it? You've used your research to say far more than that - which is why it's so irresponsible.

And even if you're adopting that as your position, it's not necessarily right either. It's not free to the charity to donate online, as other people on here closer to the question than me have put to you.