London Site Management (LSM) 

London has the most fundraising capacity and so has the most complex allocation system.

Allocations to Greater London’s 132 designated fundraising sites are run on a four-week basis. Charities all bid for space by informing CIOF Public Fundraising of the number of fundraisers they expect to have working during this period. 

All the fundraiser bids are added up so each bid can be expressed as a percentage of total bids. 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 132 sites, there are currently 20 Grade A, 61 Grade B and 51 Grade C, graded according to the number of recruiter days they allow per week: 

Charities/agencies are randomly assigned a percentage of A, B and C sites according to their fundraiser bids. For example, if the bid for 40 fundraisers amounted to 5% of the total 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: 

Grade B Sites include: 

Grade C Sites are generally in smaller high streets with a lower footfall. They include: 

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. 

National Site Diaries (NSDs) 

CIOF Public Fundraising currently manages 108 other diaries for English and Welsh cities and towns where street fundraisers operate but these are far less complicated because they have far fewer sites. Nottingham for instance has three 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 in some diaries. 

The diaries are published as clash reports and members negotiate over a two week period until the available visits have been divided equitably. The following week, once the diaries have been tidied up and the names of charities added, they are sent to their relevant gatekeeper partners. 

Scotland 

CIOF Public Fundraising 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.