Spare Change

I don’t have a fixed opinion about charities or charity fundraising. It’s best to remain flexible, loose in what you know and what you think. It’s best not to have fixed opinions about anything really (unless you’re on social media, in which case everything is either black or white, but never any of the cool shades found in between).

I came to the industry (it was, or was becoming, an industry) in 1995. The sweet old ladies (they were mostly ladies) who organised collections, who knocked on people’s doors and left them envelopes in which they could share some spare change, those ladies were becoming redundant.

They still populated the rickety old office (located above a branch of Nationwide on Baldwin Street, central Bristol) when I first joined up. There were piles of computer printouts for all the different collections taking place around the country. You’d phone people up and cajole them to do a local collection, then you’d have to negotiate which streets they would cover. Maps were consulted. The admin involved sometimes felt intractable.

The whole system was well meaning but hopeless on several different levels. But I wasn’t there long before all those sweet old ladies had become a thing of the past. I often wondered where they went, because there must’ve been a great sense of community in what they were doing – but where they went was doubtless the charity shops that were slowly expanding and taking over strategic pockets of the high street. They weren’t dispossessed for long.

If I’m going to castigate the charity sector for becoming more like other businesses, then I would have to castigate myself. Why had I applied in the first place, if not because I needed a job? However much my heart was in the right place, at the end of the day it was going to be a regular pay check that covered the bills, that meant I could move out from my sister’s house and rent a room of my own.

What I had (in essence) was just another office job. And if you don’t believe me, one of my co-workers in those early days was a student, unfeasibly tall, by the name of Stephen Merchant. He learnt a thing or two about office life. He’d just made his first TV appearance, as a contestant on the quiz show Blockbusters. Not the cool version of Blockbusters presented by Bob Holness, but the now mostly forgotten reboot with dull old Michael Aspel and grown up contestants rather than cheeky school children. (‘Can I have a P please, Bob?’ … or when the rave scene went mainstream, ‘Can I have an E please, Bob?’)

Stephen didn’t last long – either on Blockbusters or in our offices. That was usually the way with students. Some would stick around for the long haul, some would even make their way into more senior positions, but most would come in with the breeze and disperse again before you’d even got to learn their names.

The next I heard of Stephen Merchant was when The Office became a hit BBC comedy (and then an even bigger hit US comedy), but even that I only discovered in retrospect because in the era that the original Office hit the screens I was still blissfully living out my TV-free existence.

(And if you’re wondering if any characters in The Office were based on me, then I can point you to any random episode where you see someone sitting in the back of the shot, filling out the scene but having no lines of dialogue and no character forming gestures or mannerisms. Blink and you miss them. That’s me. All of those are me.)

Once they’d given up the ghost on those endless, Sisyphean house to house collections, a new regime came in. Gone were the muddled piles of computer printout and the endlessly studied A-Z maps, in were tightly written scripts where you asked supporters to commit to a regular monthly donation. Gift Aided if you could, to add the extra tax benefit. Failing that, your fallback position was to ask for a one off donation. (Standing order or credit card payment, to lessen the paperwork.) The scripts carefully weaved in reasons for why the money was needed, why regular money was better for long term planning, and explanations of all the good things that could be achieved with that money.

This type of fundraising was performative. It turned out (strangely) to be a skill I possessed. I could read the scripts almost verbatim and make it sound as though it was coming naturally off the top of my head. Most people tended to read stiffly and the people they were trying to convince could see through the charade (if you wanted to look it as a charade). When you can see the nuts and bolts of the thing, you lose faith in it.

Callers were encouraged to improvise, to see the script as a loose framework, with a few key phrases that you needed to recite verbatim while elsewhere it was better to express things in your own words. I guess the most successful callers could either adopt this method well or had a similar skill to mine in making a script sound unscripted.

While ActionAid were my employers (or technically their subsidiary, the National Telephone Team [NTT]), they were by this point also working on behalf of an ever growing range of other charities. We’d make calls for everyone from Greenpeace to Amnesty, from Help The Aged to Cancer Research, from the RNLI to The Samaritans. It was all grist to the mill. In those early years, everything was expansion. Even my own reputation was expanding. When new clients came down to listen to sample calls, members of the marketing team would request me to come in and sit at one of the monitored lines.

I was in demand. I was flavour of the month.

Of course that didn’t last. Nothing does. The more they expanded, the more new people they employed. Inevitably there were soon others who could do as good or a better job than I had done. I suppose eventually I might’ve burnt out, but instead (via the help of one of my friends who had started out at the same time as me), I got to move upwards (or at least sideways) to a subsection of the business that took incoming calls.

Here was where the donators came to you. Adverts would play on the radio or on one of the many satellite TV channels, exhorting people to help the elderly or adopt a child in a developing world country. At the end they’d give out a number and we’d be waiting ready to take their call. It was a proportionately small part of the call centre business and as such those supervising operations were mostly left to get on and run it for themselves.

On a wider scale ActionAid (and particularly its NTT subsidiary in Bristol) had changed immensely since I first arrived there. Business people and office managers and the like were replacing their well-meaning, less corporate predecessors. Our new boss wanted to move us out of the homely old offices above Nationwide and into a purpose built shiny office block that came with a coffee shop on the ground floor and where businesses like BT inhabited several of the other levels. It was also close to M&S which seemed somehow to also be important. (For whom, well not the unadopted children or the elderly, struggling to heat their homes…)

My new role still had a performative element. Sometimes people would ring in, enraged by the concept of asking for money to aid people overseas. (Charity begins at home, don’t you know). Although it was best policy to terminate such calls as quickly and politely as possible, sometimes I would get the urge to take these people on. Help The Aged was the perfect cause, as they had fundraisers for people both at home and overseas. I would patiently explain this and then ask if they’d be interested in supporting a campaign for the elderly in this country. At this point the phrase charity begins at home often lost its edge for these callers. Most likely it was charity stays at home. And that’s my home, not anyone else’s thank you very much and goodbye.

Back in the wider world, the NTT had become like Icarus. They’d flown too close to the sun and now their wings were melting. Plush new offices and a state of the art phone system were all well and good, but they came at a price. Clients often came and went at short notice. There were a couple of rival organisations that offered similar services to ours and there were often whispered conversations among senior management about work that had been lost or gained to our rivals.

Eventually they had to enact the big reset. They couldn’t sack those at the bottom, the people that actually made the calls. They didn’t want to sack themselves, the senior management that ran everything. So somewhere in the middle, a whole raft of people who actually did the most work to keep everything running smoothly, were sacrificed. My own position ended on December 23^rd, 2000 – with no prior warning, meaning bizarrely they ended up paying me for a month in lieu of giving statutory notice. By that point I really didn’t mind. I was stale. The vibes were stale. Like most jobs I’d had, it had been five years and done.

I fancied a change of scene, a chance to say goodbye to city life and move on. This came as the perfect opportunity.

*

So I definitely had opinions and experiences to share. I still felt at heart that most people in the charity sector were good people. Most charities were genuinely doing their best to raise money as cost effectively as they could. Paying people to fundraise was not in itself a bad idea in principle. But there was definitely a tipping point where I’d seen the wide spread integration of people from commercial backgrounds into our business. We’d lost some of our heart and some of our soul. It had become a numbers game and when the numbers were good then that was fine, but once the numbers became less good there was nothing else to fall back on.

I’d still say it’s better to support a charity than simply sit back and decry them all for being a waste of money (or corrupt). You just need to choose carefully who you want to support and do some due diligence before you hand over your money. Or perhaps support something smaller scale, more local to you, where you have a better handle of what’s being done in your name.

(The nuts and bolts of the charity industry can seem rather a dry topic, while the people who populated those five years - the good, the bad and the slightly psychotic - were less so. We'll return to those, shortly.)