Best outsourcing books according to redditors

I did this for about eight months, but not for Save The Children. There are a few major for-profit companies that do street fundraising for their nonprofit partners. In Boston, the major ones are Grassroots Campaigns, Inc., Dialogue Direct, and MASSPIRG/Fund For the Public Interest. (The last one is technically a nonprofit).

What's it like to do this job? Is it stressful to be ignored so often?

Really depends on your personality. If you're used to campaign work, you get used to the rejection. Our turnover rate is ridiculously high. The average employee lasts maybe two or three weeks. If you stay for more than a couple months, you're an anomaly. So for most, the answer is yes, it's stressful. I've been volunteering on campaigns since I was 13, so I knew what I was signing up for, and wasn't too surprised by how we were treated. It still made me bitter, and that bitterness wasn't healthy. I found myself, off the clock, judging in my head who would stop and who wouldn't, and getting irrationally angry at people I knew nothing about. That's not normal. The job itself is pretty fun, though. If you're good at fundraising, and you know you'll make quota, it's a fairly laid-back job. Fun coworkers, and you get to work mostly unsupervised, which I loved. I would always hit quota, so I'd spend a lot of my shift just having conversations with people, even if I knew they weren't going to donate. I got to have a lot of really interesting conversations with people, learned a lot, and got a whooooole lot of good stories about the crazies.

EDIT: Rose-colored glasses have fogged my memory, and I feel like I should add a little more detail. The office was hilariously managed. You had a small handful of directors leading the canvass crew. While their turnover rate wasn't as abysmal as ours, it was still concerningly high. Staying for more than a year was unusual for them. About a third of our crew were made "Field Managers" after their third shift. It's a meaningless title. The FM's job is to keep an eye on your crew when in the field. You train the new kids, make sure everyone is taking their required breaks, call the shots on who gets to stand where, and fill out a little extra end-of-day paperwork. The idea here is that giving a canvasser with potential a fancy title and a small amount of power will make them feel more invested and loyal to the company. Every day, we'd spend an hour in the office doing "training". This training primarily consisted of teaching the new kids the script word-for-word in a demeaning, kindergarten-esque "repeat-after-me" exercise. Deviation from the script was prohibited, and we were meant to memorize "response structures" for common questions/objections. If you hear a canvasser that sounds awkward and robotic, it's because he was trained to believe that any slight deviation from the script would get him fired, and that as long as you repeat the script word-for-word, you'll get donations. I made up my own "script", raised more than the majority of my coworkers, and was still punished for not following instructions. We were micromanaged to no end, and this became frustrating.

Are you paid on commission?

Yes. The pay structure was a bit complicated, and the commission fluctuated based on our office average. Here's how it worked: our nonprofit partners pay our employer a set amount of money per shift they send out. If four canvassers go out, we get paid 4n, if six go out we get paid 6n, no matter how much we actually raise. The way that money is distributed, however, makes it so we're able to make commission. Every pay period, the office average is calculated. Let's say that, on average, canvassers raised $180 per shift this pay period. The office calculates 80% of that figure (in this case that's $144), and that's our quota. If you worked six shifts in a pay period, you'd be expected to raise (6 x $144 = $864). If you raised $864 or less, you were paid minimum wage. For every dollar you raise above $864, you take home $0.25. There were additional rules in place for large donations (I think anything over $200) where you'd only take home 10% or something. So you'd take home more money from ten $100 donations than from one $1000 donation. Over half of the office made $11-13/hour. The top fundraisers would usually take home $15-18/hour. Highest I ever got was $22/hour, on a week that the rest of the office sucked and I had a killer few days. One more note: monthly donors, or sustainers, were our #1 goal. If you got someone to pledge $10/month, you multiply that number by seven for your commission. So if you got a $10/month donor, a $10 one-time donor, and a $20 one-time donor, you technically had a $100 day.

How much money goes to the actual charities?

This is where it gets fucked up, and is most of the reason why I quit. Check out this document on the Attorney General's website. Grassroots is a good example. The ACLU lost $30,000 on them in 2015, meaning that they gave -0.96% of their revenue to them. Doctors Without Borders lost $400,000 on them, for a contribution rate of -55.03%. The Nature Conservancy lost $120,000 on them, making their rate -26.90%. Planned Parenthood was the worst, losing almost $2,000,000 on them with a rate of -136.66%.

Now, technically 100% of the money we raise goes directly to the nonprofits we fundraise for. But If I raise $100 and give that to a nonprofit, and then they turn around and pay me $150 for my labor, is that still a totally accurate statement?

Is this a growing industry? How is it organized?

Unfortunately, yes. Individual grassroots organizations are finding that it's profitable to outsource their field work. This results in "activists" with no personal attachment to the organizations they represent. Here's something I wrote right after I quit:

>
If progressive nonprofits want to succeed, they need to start building and investing in their own field teams. Outsourcing their canvassing to for-profit corporations where the average employee lasts three weeks just isn't good enough.

> Movements aren't built by canvassers who get a total of two hours between "this is the name of the group we represent" and "now it's your turn to fundraise, good luck". They aren't built by canvassers who are told they MUST follow a specific script, word-for-word, with no variations. And they definitely aren't built by canvassers who guilt the public into thinking that the only way they can get involved with a cause is to give money, even if they don't have any money to give.

>The nonprofits we represent do amazing work, and I loved having hundreds of conversations about important issues with strangers on the street, but this model of fundraising needs to end.

____

If you're interested in this topic, I can't recommend enough the amazing book by Dana Fisher, Activism, Inc.: How the Outsourcing of Grassroots Campaigns Is Strangling Progressive Politics in America. She works for PIRG and documents her time there in amazing detail. It felt like it could have been written by one of my coworkers, how accurate it was. And she explains exactly why this model of fundraising is so flawed.

For a shorter read, my former co-worker Ria published this piece on Medium.