The aim of the Chartered Institute site allocations function is to manage public fundraising activities effectively by:
- Identifying suitable sites for public fundraising
- Liaising with public and private site owners / controllers throughout the UK to facilitate acceptable, productive and sustainable levels of activity
- Allocating capacity to charities and professional fundraising organisations in a fair and equitable way
In our role as a bridge between charity and council, we are seeking a balance between the right of the charity to fundraise and the right of the public to go about their business.
This is achieved through:
- Site management agreements with town centre managers and local authorities
- Maintaining diaries which make clear to our members and partner councils which fundraisers will be in an area at any one time.
This section lists all the sites contained in the London Site Management grouped by postcode. Click on the relevant postcode to view sites.
The Chartered Institute controls all street fundraising in the 32 London Boroughs through the London Site Management (LSM) system. Conditions agreed in SMAs within London are listed on this page. Some local authority gatekeepers need to be notified of intended visits and you should refer to the relevant SMA for notification details. You can access all SMAs here.
London has the most fundraising capacity and so has the most complex allocation system.
Allocations to Greater London’s 135 designated fundraising sites are run on a four-week basis. Charities all bid for space by informing the Compliance Directorate of the number of fundraisers they will have working during this period – the number of ‘recruiter days’.
For example if a charity expects to employ 20 fundraisers during a four-week period, they would need to make a bid for an allocation of (20 x 5 x 4) = 400 recruiter days. For the sake of simplicity it is assumed that all fundraisers work 5 days a week. Holidays and suchlike do not need to be factored in.
All the recruiter day requests are added up so each request can be expressed as a percentage of total requests. Five per cent of this capacity is reserved for the Pool so that all the participants’ percentages make up 95 per cent of the total allocation, rather than 100 per cent.
Of the 135 sites, there are 22 Grade A, 62 Grade B and 51 Grade C, graded according to the number of recruiter days they allow per week:
- Grade A – 16-24 recruiter days
- Grade B – 10-15 recruiter days
- Grade C – 9 or fewer recruiter days
Charities/agencies are randomly assigned a percentage of A, B and C sites according to their recruiter day bids. For example, if the bid for 400 recruiter days amounted to 5% of the total recruiter day bids for this period, the charity would receive 5% of the Grade A sites, 5% of the Grade B sites and 5% of the Grade C sites.
Grade A Sites are those sites that can sustain the most fundraising activity. They are usually large central or suburban high streets with a high footfall. They include:
- Tottenham Court Road
- Wimbledon
- Camden Market
- Borough High Street
- Hounslow East
Grade B Sites include:
- Haymarket
- Great Portland Street
- Kings Road
- Carnaby Street
- Twickenham
- Walthamstow
Grade C Sites are generally in smaller high streets with a lower footfall. They include:
- Peckham
- Lambeth North
- Bankside
- Highgate Village
- Walworth Road
Five per cent of capacity is reserved for the Pool. This is meant for new entrants to street fundraising, enabling them to test the method, or for smaller organisations with fewer fundraisers so they can have fair access and aren’t required to go through the LSM bidding procedure. Other members can go into the pool to top up their allocations – a provider can request five visits to pool sites each week but can’t request to go more than once to the same Pool site.
The Compliance Directorate runs numerous other diaries for other cities and towns where street fundraisers operate but they are far less complicated because most have far fewer sites available. Nottingham for instance, has four sites, Leeds has five sites and Liverpool and Plymouth have two sites each.
Every four weeks, members send their requests for the different sites in the various National Site Diaries. These requests are added to the diaries but, as sites are not randomly assigned as they are in London, members bid for their preferred sites, and this inevitably leads to clashes.
The diaries are published as clash reports and members negotiate over a two week period until the available visits have been divided equally. The following week, once the diaries have been tidied up the names of charities added, they are sent to their relevant gatekeeper partners.
The Compliance Directorate runs three diaries for Scotland; Edinburgh, Glasgow and Out of Town. Members request sites in the same way as they do for the NSDs but clashes are negotiated in a single day in an on-line meeting every four weeks.