The state of street canvassing

We’ve all experienced that knock on the door, usually during dinner, and almost always involving a sincere-looking soul, clipboard in hand, asking for just a moment to discuss this important cause. Of course they don’t want to talk about the cause, they just want you to give them money, but okay, fine, you get the drill. They’re fundraising. Often the organization is instantly apparent and familiar - Heart and Stroke, Canadian Diabetes Association - though sometimes it only sounds familiar, like a name you’d give to a charity if you wanted it to sound legit. But is it? Frequently it’s hard to know. When there are an estimated 170,000 Canadian nonprofits and charities, 88,000 that are registered, it can be difficult to confidently draw the line between the good and the bad, the altruistic and the scammers, especially face-to-face.

But Bruce MacDonald, president and CEO of Imagine Canada, a national charitable organization dedicated to providing charities and nonprofit organizations with programs, assistance and resources, says the reputation is undeserved.

“When you are a sector of 88,000 organizations, there are going to be some that operate at a higher level than others, just like you’re going to have good car mechanics and bad car mechanics,” says MacDonald. “But I’ve been working in the sector for 30 years and one of the things that concerns me is the perception that there’s wide spread fraud and mismanagement – I have not witnessed it.”

He points out that people need to remember volunteers govern the vast majority of charities.

“People like them, their neighbours, their aunts, their uncles, their friends – they sit on boards of directors in part because they believe in the cause and in part because they want the organizations to run well,” he says.

Part of building that trust between fundraisers going door-to-door or street canvassers and the communities they’re operating in comes down to ensuring they’re trained properly says Caroline Riseboro, a board member of the Association of Fundraising Professionals’ Greater Toronto Chapter.

“The vast majority of people that come to your door are there because they work on behalf of recognized, well established, and well respected charities,” she says. “Yes, in any type of exchange – and I don’t think it’s unique to the charity world, it happens in the commercial sector as well – there are a very small percentage that may take advantage of the situation but that is by no means representative the vast majority of people.”

She says usually it’s the larger charities that engage door-to-door companies to do fundraising on their behalf.

“These are usually well respected charities with their own brands and so if someone is coming to your door – usually the person would have heard of the organization, whether it’s a large cancer charity or a large poverty relief charity,” adds Riseboro.

The canvassers will wear lanyards or uniforms and have some sort of information to prove that they actually work on behalf of the charity. Riseboro says they also should be able to provide you with information on what the charity represents, how much it spends on overheads and where the donor dollars should be going.

“We train on what are the ethical practices when fundraising,” she says. “No charity canvasser, for example, should ever use high pressure sales tactics – that’s not something that is ever acceptable.”

On the backend, there are mechanisms that organizations track to ensure that the canvassers are doing their jobs. For instance, they may show up with GPS and payment processing enabled tablets with information about the organization and link directly to the charity’s website so you feel more confident donating on the spot.

“With GPS, the manager will know exactly where the canvassers are or have been because they’ve been tracking their coordinates,” says Riseboro. “We also track things like complaints or compliments; if we have any comments about problems with a canvasser then immediately that’s tracked.”

It works the other way too. Fundraising managers can track how many people the canvassers – who are usually paid hourly wages but sometimes by commission – have signed up to donate.

“If we have one canvasser who has a lot of donors cancelling, that’s a red flag to understand if this person has been representing the charity well,” she says. “Technology has enabled a certain level of sophistication with door-to-door fundraising that most people wouldn’t see upfront – it’s allowed us as a profession to add a certain layer of accountability that didn’t exist before.”

Accountability aside, Riseboro says it’s also up to the consumers to do their due diligence and research the organization.

“They usually have a number that you can call,” she says. “No fundraiser wants anybody to make a donation without being sure that it’s something they want to do.”

But Mark Blumberg, a lawyer at Blumberg Segal LLP focused on non-profit and charity law and the founder of charity scam resource site www.SmartGiving.ca, says you should check more sources than just the charity’s website.

“One of the tools I suggest people use is Imagine Canada’s charityfocus.ca, which is a list of the 86,000 charities with some financial information attached to it,” says Blumberg adding that it pulls the Canada Revenue Agency’s data on registered charities. “But I would also tell people be careful about relying on financial ratios to determine things because they’re so easily manipulated.”

Imagine Canada’s MacDonald agrees, adding that the focus needs to be on the impact of a charity as opposed to finances. The nice part is that organizations are getting much better at talking about the impact.

“Whether that’s social return on investment studies, program evaluations, or research reports – more and more charities realize that we live in an outcome driven world and are ensuring that they can tell the story of their success both from the perspective of those that have required their services but also from a quantifiable perspective,” he says.

But if there’s one element giving Canadians should definitely not hinge their decision-making on is whether or not it’s registered.

“The CRA is not looking at how wonderful the organization is, they’re looking for certain legal criteria,” says Blumberg. “If you’re an evil person with the right criteria, you’re going to get registered.”