A conversation with James Julien

Two years ago today, a friend and mentor of mine named James Julien passed away in Australia after two consecutive strokes. He was thirty-eight.

I had the pleasure of meeting and working with James at Public Outreach, the fundraising consultancy that he founded in 2002 with Bryan McKinnon and John Finlay. In 2006, I also had the pleasure of interviewing him on behalf of Indiepolitik, a now-defunct attempt of my own to bring local artists and activists together.

The interview, and the Indiepolitik website, are no longer available online. So here, in memory of a friend and local hero, is the interview in its entirety:

How did the idea for Public Outreach come about?

Well, this is probably a long story, but I can try to summarize. Also, I can promise your readers that if they slog through this question, the answers will get shorter later on!

The first person to start a company like Public Outreach was John Finlay, who’s one of my business partners today. Back in 1995, he had run Greenpeace‘s national door-to-door programme for most of the early 1990s and he set out on his own to provide this service for other charities. I think Council of Canadians was the first client he had and we did a couple of months of door canvassing for them. It went really well, but basically we didn’t recognize just how valuable monthly donors were at the time and so we didn’t recognize how well the campaign had gone. So, that’s one place the idea came from.

More recently, it was my idea to jump into this company. Since 1995 I had run the direct mail and telefundraising for Greenpeace, and then moved on to consult with a couple of telefundraising agencies. It was a great way to learn a lot about fundraising and to do some good work, but I really started to get the itch to run my own show, so to speak.

By 2002 there was a company, then called Caring Together, who was operating pretty extensively in Canada doing door-to-door campaigns recruiting monthly donors for a lot of nonprofit organizations. I looked at how they were working and I thought a better job could be done. The main issues I had with their methods – and remember, I never worked with them, so some of this is speculative – were that they appeared to pay their canvassers on some type of commission, that they tended to represent a number of charities at one time – “Don’t like Greenpeace? How about the Canadian Bible Society?” – and they were the only option, so there wasn’t much incentive for them to improve.

Our plan was to start a small operation with a high standard, in order to raise the bar for anyone else offering these services. We achieved that, but charities then decided they wanted to work with us instead, which has driven our growth to this point.

What exactly does Public Outreach do for its clients? If a charity or nonprofit group signs a contract with you, then what can they expect to get out of it?

Simple answer: We design and execute street, door-to-door and mall-based fundraising campaigns to recruit monthly donors for them. The biggest part of the job is hiring, training and managing the people who speak with the public and ask them to donate to that client. Right now we have nine offices across Canada and probably more than three hundred people working with us, so that’s a big job. We’re also a fundraising consultancy, so we provide advice on how to communicate with the donors we introduce to the organization, etc. But the lion’s share of the work is actually recruiting donors.

What sort of clients are you currently representing?

It’s a mix. We work for some pretty big organizations, like UNICEF, Sick Kids Foundation, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, etc. and we’re able to put together the large campaigns they need. We also have smaller groups, like the AIDS Committee of Toronto, or Amnesty’s French chapter in Canada, which is a lot smaller than the English group.

One challenge for the smaller groups is that recruiting monthly donors is an investment program. That is, each person who signs up for $15 per month – the average for most groups – will probably donate close to $1,000 over time, but the cost of recruiting that donor is paid up front. For a smaller group, with less money in the bank, it’s sometimes just not possible. We’ve got a few smaller organizations where we’re basically delaying billing until the money from the donors comes in, but obviously there are limits to what one company can do there, especially a four-year-old company.

Public Outreach is an independent organization, and you aren’t directly affiliated with any charity or nonprofit group. How do you choose which organizations you’re willing to work with? Has there ever been a group that you’ve had to turn down because it just didn’t seem like a good fit?

To put it plainly, we’re a business. Having got that out of the way, we’re a business owned by guys who have worked for nonprofits for pretty much their whole adult lives and have our own social and political beliefs, so that’s a factor too.

In choosing what clients to work with, we basically look at the company we have and try to be honest with ourselves about what it can do well. If we honestly think we can do a good job of representing a group to the public, we’ll consider it, but there are clearly cultural realities we need to consider. To that end, we’ve generally stay away from faith-based groups – of any faith – and the groups [we represent] tend to be pretty lefty, which a lot of people would call progressive.

We try to provide a workplace that fosters political and ideological diversity, but we need to recognize that taking on a group that would be offensive to people already working here has a cost to our ability to help all our clients. So, it’s balancing that with not wanting to be a total leftist echo chamber, which I think is also a disservice to everyone involved.

In terms of groups we’ve opted not to work with, it’s mainly been on the grounds of the group not being ready for this type of investment in fundraising, or just giving us the impression they’d be really hard to work with. We haven’t been approached by any groups that I can remember that really put the cultural fit to the test.

Where are your offices located? How many people do you have working for you in each city?

We have offices in Victoria, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec City and Halifax. The number of people varies seasonally in most cities. Toronto’s the biggest, with a low of probably eighty to a hundred in winter and close to two hundred in summer. Montreal varies between forty to eighty, whereas Vancouver tends to stay around fifty to sixty year-round. The rest of the offices tend to be from ten to thirty staff depending on the time of year.

What do you look for in a canvasser? What’s important in terms of skills, experience and personality?

Well, the company’s tagline is “Honest, Respectful, Effective,” and those are the first things we look for. In terms of skills, experience, etc., it mainly comes down to their motivation and how well they communicate. If they understand what the charity does and if they really believe donating to that is a good idea, that’s the right motivation. We help people with what to say and how to say it, but a person who just naturally makes people feel comfortable around them is going to be more successful.

Aside from being good at helping people to decide to donate, I’d say the other key is being good at respecting the donor’s right to say no. That means giving them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it’s a bad day. Maybe they care about something else. Given than more than ninety percent of the people we deal with aren’t going to give, thinking of all those people who say “no” as mean or selfish really gets in the way.

You’ve told me that you got your start in fundraising and business management in the early nineties, as a member of an indie band called Dig Circus. How did you get involved in the group? What sort of fundraising were you doing?

My first fundraising job was in high school, when I worked as an operator at World Vision. I was seventeen and really starting to think more that I should do something to help fix all the things I felt were wrong with the world. Asking people to donate money to help turned out to be something I was pretty good at.

I went to Humber College to study music and kept that job through that period, till I moved downtown to pursue band life. I decided [on] playing in one band and hoping to make that work, rather than all the wedding and bar gigs I was doing at the time. Who want’s to play “Lady in Red” their whole life?

So, while my band was playing, recording, etc., I worked at Greenpeace as a telefundraiser and ended up managing that phone room. It was a flexible job that allowed me to devote time to my band and, well, sleep late.

How do you go from being in a band to running your own fundraising company? How did one experience prepare you for the other? What do those two worlds have in common?

There are some important things in common, I think. First, both music and fundraising are all about repeat business. I was the guy who went around at the shows collecting phone numbers – this was before email! – and I’d call everyone before every show. It was about two hundred calls and when I did it, forty more people would show up and pay their six or seven dollars.

With fundraising, if charities had to go to new people for donations every time, they’d generally have little or no money to actually do their work. The reason we focus on monthly giving is it allows a not-rich person to donate more money without the charity having to keep spending money to ask them.

With the kind of work we do, canvassing, there’s even more in common. We have a lot of artists and musicians working here and, having been there, we’re pretty flexible and supportive about their other work. In my case, I realized I was going to make a bigger impact on the world raising money than playing bass. Everyone has to make that choice for themselves, though.

What are your plans for the future? How would you like to see the company to develop over the next five years?

Personally, I’m trying to move more into a teaching role within the fundraising community. The last four years has been mainly establishing these relationships with our clients, which has been really rewarding. I think we’ve built something here we can all be really proud of. But it’s not enough. People still die of diseases for which there are treatments and cures, there are people with no homes, with no hope.

There’s enough money out there to help these people, it’s just a matter of making giving money to help people more appealing than spending it on other things. I want to help develop new ways of showing how good it feels to donate your money to something you believe in. Giving money isn’t the only answer, but it’s a big part of it.

More practically, Public Outreach will continue to grow and will probably expand into other countries in the coming years. We’ve raised the bar here, so spreading that around is probably a good idea.

How can people get involved in Public Outreach? Are you hiring?

We’re pretty much always hiring. We’re pretty good at finding work for good people. One thing we haven’t covered is what it’s like to work here. One of the first decisions we made about the company is that it would pay no commission or bonus based on the funds people raise. This is actually good for the canvassers. We start people at $12 per hour, and supervisors make $14 per hour, so it’s not a fortune, but it’s better than a lot or retail jobs. With a commission-based pay, you’re always under pressure and that pressure gets passed on to the donors, which we don’t want.

We feel it’s our job as the owners of the company to give you the tools you need to succeed – the right clients, goals, materials, etc. – and if you can’t succeed, we’re prepared to make up the difference to some degree.

Also, being a growing company means that new opportunities are always coming up. We’re committed to helping people learn important skills. A lot of the things we ask of our staff, like being someone’s supervisor, it’s the first time they’ve done it and so we make an extra effort to help them get it right. These end up being skills they can not only show on their resume, but actually feel confident with.

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