We were very fortunate to be at the very first international Face-to-Face Fundraising conference in Vienna last month. I mean Vienna in June with added fundraising, what’s not to like?

I have been a strong proponent of Face-to-Face since running my first campaigns in the early bronze age around 1997. Face-to-Face was the primary reason that regular giving in the UK doubled in the period to 2010 and it has recruited tens of millions of supporters for non-profits in nearly 100 countries around to world to date.

But the approach has always been controversial, most of all within the non-profit sector itself. We still find many detractors today, particularly amongst trustees and senior leaders in non-profits we work with. I have lost count of organisations I have spoken to who have said “face to face isn’t for us”, whilst usually simultaneously looking to increase their predictable unrestricted income.

Let’s be clear, there are issues with Face-to-Face. In pretty much every market where it operates, the approach is facing increasing costs to sign up new donors while retention of face-to-face recruited supporters has long been an issue.  There’s plenty of incidences of this form of fundraising being done badly, leading to poor quality and supporter dissatisfaction. And lots of people don’t love the approach but then who really likes being asked to give money to charity?

But Face-to-Face remains the most important channel for new regular donor acquisition in most of the world’s fundraising markets and, done well, continues to be profitable and effective for large numbers of non-profits of all cause types.

One of the most common objections to this fundraising approach is the negative effects it might have on a charity’s brand. This is a view firmly held by some individuals, but I have never seen any data to support this contention.

So, I was very interested in a presentation by the Norwegian Air Ambulance at the F2F Conference. When they set up a Face-to-Face programme a few years ago they wanted to know how it would affect their brand reputation. Interestingly, the fundraising programme was led by someone with a brand marketing background, so he did what brand people do and tracked awareness and satisfaction levels before and after the programme was introduced.

The result? The Face-to-Face programme, which was developed as an integrated campaign with the charity’s other marketing and communications activities was extremely successful and drove very healthy income growth. But it also resulted in a significant increase on both awareness of the charity in Norway and trust in its brand. The more fundraising they did and the more conversations they had, the higher brand trust was.

Not only this, when surveyed the supporters recruited through Face-to-Face had a much better understanding of the work the charity did than those recruited from other channels and a more positive impression of it.

I suspect that not every Face-to-Face programme would have the same effect on a charity’s brand. This was a particularly well-designed campaign that thought about income generation and brand value in a holistic way.  The charity started with high levels of recognition and support. But it does I think demonstrate how the power of the personal conversation is undervalued by many charities.

Even those charities who use Face-to-Face often do not particularly value the people carrying out this activity for them, whether they are agency or in house staff. It is often managed in a very transactional way with very little support from senior staff, let alone trustees. But these individuals are critical ambassadors for a non-profit’s brand, having thousands of conversations with potential supporters every week.

Fundraising and brand are far too often treated as separate functions by non-profits. In reality, of course they are intertwined. Most major non-profit public brands were built originally by fundraising, whilst every fundraising activity is hugely impacted by people’s awareness and trusts levels in the non-profit.

Face-to-Face remains a really important communications channel for many non-profits and how the activity is used to strengthen and reinforce organisational messaging is a critical question for marketing.  As important is the challenge of how other channels can support Face-to-Face.