Chugging Charities? Name and Shame!

Named and shamed? No longer deserve our support?? Oh give over....
It's not extortion... you're not forced at gun-point to hand over the money.
You are free to walk by them - If they forcefully approach you (say by grabbing you) you can then lodge a complaint to the gardaí as this is illegal.
Besides, there's obviously lots of chuggers about as they must be increasing revenues for charities - surely thats a good thing.

Maybe its time we named and shamed big corporations and Governments that require such charities to exist in the first place to help the sick / needy.

You'll probably want to name and shame countries where tourists come from as there's lots of them here standing about.. taking photos.. and whatnot..

If you think Chuggars are bad.... Take a walk down oxford Street any day of the week. Hundreds of people handing out flyers for cheap calls to India and what not. Do I LOOK LIKE A FÚCKING INDIAN!?

John

Lump wrote:

If you think Chuggars are bad.... Take a walk down oxford Street any day of the week. Hundreds of people handing out flyers for cheap calls to India and what not. Do I LOOK LIKE A FÚCKING INDIAN!?

John

But at least they are not after your bank details whilst your walking down the street though are they? And I doubt that they try and make you feel guilty for not making more phone calls to India, well mabye they will do that actually, but there are unlikley to be any pictures of children dying due to lack of phone calls in their leaflets.

Charities will always need to spend a certain % on admin and marketing.
If not chuggers, they'd spend that allocation on direct (junk) mail, or TV / radio advertising.
Chuggers must work well as its "interactive" - once a person is interested, they usually sign up with the chugger taking the details and can supply more info. With direct mail, the person would still have to reply back and the chance would decrease.

My point being, charities will always want to contact you one way or another... Chuggers just has a bad name at the moment. They seem to be of the "love to hate" variety.
Believe me, if charities thought they were a danger to their operation, they'd pull them off the streets straight away.
Mind you, I hate junk mail more than chuggers...

DanR wrote:

What has annoyed me redcently though is Gorta knocking on my door and giving me a five minute guilt trip. In my opinion that is an invasion of privacy.

good point....
I doubt anyone would prefer door-to-door than to chuggers.

Sleepy wrote:

I can't believe that so many of you are happy to see such people making money off the backs of the needy. It's disgusting tbh. I'd always thought that RTE, BBC etc gave the airtime for charity commercials for free/heavily discounted rates (as in enough to cover their costs and nothing above that).

Anyone else like to name charities using these companies?

So far Gorta and Concern are on my "never donating to again" list.

You're totally missing the point here.
Charities dont give all their money (revenue) direct to their cause.
Charities are non-profit organisations, but that doesnt mean they dont incur overheads and operating costs like any business.

Marketing and Admin, that "chuggers" fall under, is one such cost, and chugging has proved highly effective as a means to increase revenue (and thus increase profit which in turn means greater benefit to their "needy" cause).
I think you have to realise that Chugging Agencies are employed by the charities for they (the charaties) can higher revenue to then distribute to their cause.
Perhaps you want a charity to be set up to fund such "chugging" activity?
The costs have to be covered somewhere along the line.

Face it - Many people (direct or indirectly) are employed by charities and earn a good wage doing so. It's not all volunteering, but that aspect helps.
Just open the jobs section on Thurs or Fridays paper and you'll see the odd post in a charity commanding a nice paypacket. They want the best people too you know.

I have a friend working full time for the Red Cross abroad. Do you find it "disgusting" that they pay her wage?

Gorta and Concern and two of the most well respected charities in the Island, and abroad. I nearly find it offensive you bad mouth them as they have so many people working tiredlessly for their cause.... paid or not.

grimloch wrote:

Don't see why the people get paid an awful lot more than me. Surely the money is better spent elsewhere.

Unless they have to pay well to get people to do the job.....

I mentioned already, if it wasnt cost effective for the charities to be doing this, do you think they'd still be doing it??
It shouldnt degrade the charities name in anyway - it proves they are willing to try every method to capture and increase their revenue.
At the end of the day, that means more money for their needy causes.

Perhaps you should consult charities and enquiry about their fundraising / admin costs. If you think they're too high, let them know how to reduce them while keeping their revenue up.... I'm sure they'll want to hear from you if you can.

I have perfected my 'thanks, not interested, gotta run' vibe when faced with chuggers, and have blanked them out of my life.

It's the actual bucket swinging charity collections when people are being paid to collect the money that really annoy me - we all understand that chuggers are paid, but when i see a bucket i used to assume that they were volunteers. Now i don't give cash to a collection unless i'm certain it's a volunteer holding that bucket - i think paid collectors will do worse PR for charities than the chuggers.

I'm a big fan of stuff like Daffodil Day, there's a nice sense of community when i see people wearing the daffodils that day and all the collectors are volunteers donating their time to the very worthwhile cause.

urgh, reading their website just pisses me off.

chuggers wrote:

ncorporated in the autumn of 2003, our business is public fundraising by personal solicitation on high streets throughout Ireland, offering solutions that can be tailored to corporate, public and residential environments. Although a new company, Face2Face Fundraising Ireland is the latest addition to The Dialog Group, an established and renowned global organisation, operating in various fields across the charitable sector.

Face2Face Fundraising Ireland is well-known for the professional and warm manner of its management and fundraisers, and is proud of the passion of its people. We work in close partnership with our charity and NPO partners, ensuring they have trust in the campaigns Face2Face Fundraising Ireland implements on their behalf. We really want to make a difference when recruiting and developing committed donors.

Sleepy, you're living in a dream world. Chugging is a bloody tough job, and there's no way that a charity would get the number of people they need, to offer to go out and stand on the streets, providing enough cover foreven one eight hour shift each day, five to six days a week. It's actually ridiculous that you propose that they attempt to do so. Within weeks the charity's overall revenue would be down and the real victims - not the public on the streets, but the victims of poverty, hunger, diseases and disorders, lack of accommodation, basic human rights and so on (not to trivialise it, but I could go on for quite a while, and feel that it'd be unnecessary to do so again), those helped by the charity's funds - would suffer even more in the long run. Chugging is a necessary evil. Love chuggers or hate them, they do a job that nobody would be able to get people to do for nothing. You might get someone who could donate an hour or two a week - but they wouldn't have enough background information or be involved enough in the charity to know how to deal with questions that arose. You also wouldn't be able to get people to keep volunteering for long. One very hot or very wet day and you can kiss your volunteer and potential donors goodbye.

If TV ads worked, they'd be everywhere. As would billboards, etc. And there are charities out there who employ the face-to-face fundraisers themselves, inhouse. Gift and Face-2-Face are two of the agencies out there, but inhouse chugging undercuts the costs of agencies and allows charities to focus on the quality of information given, not on getting people to sign up. If you make someone believe in your cause as much as you do, or even inspire them to help a little, then you've done a good thing. If they sign up to help out financially, it's an amazing bonus - there are targets to be met, the charity needs to make money to continue their work. But the most important part of the job for me personally was raising awareness - and if I did my job properly, my information was enough to make those who could afford it help us out. If they couldn't, then that was ok. I wished them a good day, and they moved on. If I hadn't sincerely meant it, I would have found a way around it. I had a little boy run up to me one day and try to give me 50c. He looked heartbroken when I told him I couldn't take it. That made me feel really guilty.

Chuggers aren't heartless machines out on the streets to make a fortune out of people. They're people who want to help to make a difference and do their job to the best of their ability. The wages I received put extra pressure on me to do my best to spread awareness and help the cause - and it's a high pressure job as is. Agency workers can be completely motivated by the cause too - but they have higher targets than we did. Maybe that's a good thing, but I can't see how.

The Hanly Centre is different. Their method of fundraising is via scratch cards, from what I've personally experienced. I've never been asked to stop with a view to signing a standing order by anyone from the Hanly Centre. They deal in cash. Chuggers deal with paper.

Anyone can do a job. Not anyone can do a job well. Wages not only give you a degree of culpability in the necessitation of money generation but also give you an incentive to do your damndest to help, as if the cause wasn't enough.

Before I finish, I want to make one final point. The example given of a charity in the Chuggers topic where the entire charity and the investments made on the charity's behalf paid for it's running costs because of the backing of one man was a one-in-over-six-billion chance. If that kind of thing happened regularly, people wouldn't need to go out onto the street to ask people to open their eyes to what's happening in the world. They could spend that time doing more hands-on, practical work with the charity. But life isn't ideal and you work with what you've got. Even donation on websites incurrs administration costs, as does every other type of donation.

All I ask is that you be realistic about the world that we live in. Idealism is lovely, but it doesn't get people anywhere productive - especially not in charities when they have people relying more heavily on them than you could imagine.