You paid €160 for me. Then you sent me a newsletter.

Somewhere in the Netherlands, a charity just paid an agency €160 to recruit a structural donor. Let's call her Sanne. She signed up on the street on a Tuesday, slightly in a hurry, for €8 a month.

Do the math with me. At €8 a month, it takes 20 months before Sanne's donations have covered what it cost to find her. Until that moment, every euro she gives is repaying the recruitment bill.

Ten years ago, that same signature cost about €80. Today it is €140 to €180, depending on the agency. And if that sounds high, look across the North Sea: UK benchmarking puts the sector average at £242 per face-to-face recruited donor, roughly €280. The Dutch street is the cheap end of an expensive market, and the trend line points one way.

Face-to-face recruitment earned its place. When it emerged roughly 25 years ago in its latest form, it brought charities tens of thousands of structural donors. Then the sector did what the sector always does when something works: everyone jumped on it. More charities, more agencies, thousands of students flooding the same shopping streets, bidding for the same spots. The price went up 75% while the product, a stranger with a tablet, stayed exactly the same.

What the street actually sells#

The student holding the tablet works on commission. A signup pays a bonus of €50 to €80; a good Saturday pays €100 to €250. As a student, that is life-changing money compared to a shift in retail or a restaurant. I don't blame them, that's the incentive they were handed. But understand what that incentive produces.

To get to yes, promises get bent. "You can cancel anytime." "Yes, this can be a one-time gift." In practice it cannot. The channel defaults to the monthly mandate, because only a monthly mandate earns back the recruitment fee; the entire business case is built on the subscription paying itself back over years. One donor on Reddit described offering €5 on the spot: refused, fifteen euro a month minimum, and a subscription. Another agreed to what was explicitly confirmed as a one-time donation and got an email an hour later: thank you for your monthly recurring gift.

The clearest example of the incentive at work is the clawback. Contract mechanics vary by agency, but a common construction is a clawback window of around three months: if the donor cancels inside the window, the charity pays nothing, and the fundraiser's bonus evaporates with it. Sanne hesitated too, that Tuesday. Some fundraisers have an answer ready for exactly that moment: "Just keep it for three months, then you can cancel." The bonus lands anyway. The charity pays the full €160 for a donor who gave €24 and was never coming back.

The clawback also explains what happens when you try to leave. Cancel inside the first three months and the retention machine switches on: calls from the recruitment agency, often several, asking you to reconsider. If you hold firm, the offer shifts. Keep giving, but at a lower amount. Five euro instead of ten, whatever keeps the mandate alive. Sign up on Tuesday, cancel on Wednesday, and the calls still come. None of it has anything to do with your bond to the cause; the agency needs your direct debit to survive past month three, the line where the charity has to pay and the bonus becomes final. The gift is negotiable. The three months are not.

The sector will answer, correctly, that codes exist. The CBF hallmark, Goede Doelen Nederland, a gedragscode for street and door-to-door recruitment, a legal cooling-off period. They are real, and they police behaviour at the doorstep. None of them touches the economics: the price per signature, the commission structure, or where the first year of a donation goes. And a concession the other way is fair too: no other channel delivers new donors at the volume face-to-face does, which is exactly why most charities cannot simply walk away from it.

Where the recruitment fees end up#

EenVandaag went looking for where all those recruitment fees ended up, and found it. The owners of Direct Result, one of the biggest Dutch agencies, have built up close to €20 million in private assets on work for charities including Amnesty, SOS Kinderdorpen and the Armoedefonds.

According to the same investigation, Pepperminds, Trust Marketing, Emolife and XS Direct sit on millions of their own. The accountant EenVandaag asked to review the numbers called the income exorbitant for money that started as donations.

Now the asymmetry. A charity director's pay is capped at €193,497 a year, and the CBF audits the sector's annual reports. The agencies recruiting on those charities' behalf fall outside CBF supervision entirely. Running a charity comes with a salary ceiling; selling donor signatures to one comes with no ceiling at all. Professor Paul Smeets of Maastricht University told EenVandaag the obvious fix: bureaus that live off charity money should face the same scrutiny as the charities themselves. Direct Result's defence is that its rates are standard for the market, and that 30 to 55 percent of its revenue comes from commercial clients. That may be true. The whole market still runs without a meter.

The public has done this math too#

Last autumn someone posted a simple question on Reddit: what is wrong with charities these days? They had tried to give money to a street fundraiser and discovered there was no tin, no QR code, no way to just give. Only a form wanting their phone number, their email, and a monthly commitment. The post ends: "they've lost me." Three hundred upvotes.

The top comment, with another three hundred: your first year of donations goes straight to the marketing agency, so if you want to give, go to the charity's website directly. EenVandaag has since confirmed the crowd's math: at a typical €10 a month, the entire first year of a new donor's giving goes to the recruitment bureau, and the charity starts seeing money in year two. Their calculation uses a lower average fee than the street price in this piece; the mechanism is the same. Strangers on the internet were doing Sanne's math for her. Comment after comment tells the same story: donors who gave monthly for years until an evening upsell call ended it, people who now give only cash or straight to the food bank, givers who want to give once, on their terms, and are told that is not good enough.

The diagnosis matters here. The willingness to give is intact; the Netherlands still has one of the highest giving-participation rates in Europe. What died is trust in the channel and the packaging around the gift.

The silent giver#

Several charities I have spoken with over the years admit, quietly, that they hesitate to contact their existing donors. They fear that a letter or a call reminds someone that they are donating, and that the reminder itself triggers the cancellation. The model works best when donors forget they are in it.

An industry whose income depends on customers not noticing the payment is on a slippery slope. That also explains the donor journey Sanne receives: a scripted welcome sequence written before she existed, then the generic newsletter, then an upsell letter in autumn. She hears nothing about what her €8 did, and nothing about where it landed. A journey with a scripted beginning and no middle is a countdown with stationery.

The number holding it all up: 3#

Nobody panics about the €160, because the average street-recruited donor stays about 3 years. At €8 a month that is roughly €288. Subtract the acquisition cost and the model works. Historically.

The whole model leans on that number. The 3 years were earned by cohorts who stayed out of habit and the quiet inertia of a signed bank authorisation. Donors with a real bond to the cause, the ones who found the charity themselves because the mission touched their lives, stay far longer. Street-recruited donors are the most fragile cohort the sector has, and the generation now walking past the tablets cancels a streaming service the month they stop using it.

I cannot prove the 3 will fall. Call it an expectation rather than a statistic. But if it merely slides toward two years, the margin thins to almost nothing: below 20 months, every recruited donor is a loss. The channel that, by common sector estimate, delivers most new structural donors would run underwater, quietly, one year's recruits at a time.

When Sanne leaves, the donor database will say "economic reasons." Win-back programmes exist, and most are scripted calls aimed at restarting the payment rather than hearing the real story. The question nobody is paid to ask: is our experience good enough for people who demand more?

The 90/10 split and the trap#

My estimate, after six years inside the NGO sector and multiple interviews: for every euro spent on acquiring donors, roughly ten cents goes to the experience a donor has after the gift. We spend everything on the yes, and almost nothing on what comes after the yes.

A handful of large charities have read this math and quit street fundraising altogether. The returns thinned and the reputational cost stopped being worth it. Notice who could afford to leave: organisations with scale, legacy income, a broad mix of revenue streams. My estimate is that nine out of ten charities have no such luxury. Face-to-face covers their base costs and headcount, so they stay married to a channel they know is burning goodwill, €160 at a time, because the alternative is shrinking.

The cheapest euro#

I am not here to attack charities; I want them to win, and I have stood on their side of the table. The problem is a machine that every player privately agrees is broken, and that keeps running because nobody can afford to switch it off.

I wrote earlier about a sector building its future on legacies, on money from people who are about to leave. This is the other half of the story: the living donors we do recruit arrive through a channel the public increasingly distrusts, get onboarded by a countdown, sit undisturbed for fear they might notice, and leave through a door nobody watches.

The cheapest euro in fundraising is the one you do not lose. Sanne already said yes. The €160 is already spent. All she ever asked was to see her money land somewhere. That, at least, is fixable.