Direct marketing managers in UK charitable organisations

Roger Bennett and Helen Gabriel Department of Business Studies, London Guildhall University, 84 Moorgate, London EC2M 6SQ. Tel: +44 171 320 1577; Fax: +44 320 1465; e-mail: rbennett@lgu.ac.uk

Received (in revised form): 24th February, 1998

Dr Roger Bennett is a reader at the London Guildhall University His recent research has focused on charity marketing and, in particulac the impacts of various forms of advertising imagery on the effectiveness of charity market- ing campaigns. Roger’s past career has in- cluded ten years in management consultancx plus periods in the mining and engineering industries and with a leading UK commercial bank.

Helen Gabriel worked in the National Health Service which included several years as a ward sister at Ealing General Hospital, following which she completed a BA in Business Studies at London Guildhall Univer- sity where she is at present employed as a research assistant in the Department of Business Studies. Helen is currently engaged on projects involving the sponsorship of schools by commercial organisations and the marketing methods of charities concerned with eating disorders.

ABSTRACT Althoirgli the charity sector is one of the United Kingdom 3 biggest risers of direct marketing, little is krioiun aboirt the characteristics of the people who manage direct marketing within charities. This paper presents the results of a sirwey of 115 direct marketing managers in the UK’S largest firridraising charitable organisa- tions; focirsing on their experience, motivation, training and edircatiorial backgroirrids. The degrees to which respondents’ employing or- garrisations placed a high value on the market- irg jirnction and the extents to wlzicli varioirs

categories of direct marketing manager pos- sessed wide-ranging general managerial com- petencies were also examined. There was little evidence of the ‘hybridisation’ of direct market- ing specialists. Rather, individuals exhibiting hybrid manager attributes were sometimes pirt in charge of direct marketing.

INTRODUCTION In 1997 the United Kingdom had around 100,000 ‘general’ charities (ie those deemed not to comprise clubs and societies, educational institutions, housing associations, trade unions or places of religious worship) collectively receiving nearly A1 lbn per annum’ and accounting for 4.8 per cent of all UK employment.* The top 1,500 charities (measured in terms of annual revenue) took over 90 per cent of total charitable sector income; 63 per cent went to the top 500 fundraising organisations. Each month the average UK citizen gives AlO-11 to good causes,? making charities one of the largest recipients of national consumer expendi- ture. Advertising by UK charities has risen sharply. According to the UK Advertising Association (1997)3 the charity sector’s media spend grew &om E6.7m in 1983 to A40.6m in 1995 (including a 71 per cent increase between 1990 and 1995). This rate of expansion places charities in the top four UK ‘product categories’ for post-1991 speed of growth of advertising expendi- ture.

Britain’s top 500 charities are known to

adopt highly sophisticated approaches to marketing (comparable to those of large multinational businesses); to have ex- tensive marketing departments; and to employ professionally qualified (often agency trained) hndraising manager^.^.'.^ It seems, moreover, that increasing numbers of small- to medium-sized chanties now exhibit a distinct marketing orientation.’ Sargeant (1 995)’ argued that three main fHctors have contributed to the use of the latest marketing methods by U K chanties:

-the creation of large numbers of new charitable organisations consequent to the withdrawal of public hnding from numerous activities previously under- taken by the state (especially in the fields of health care and education)

- the complexity and competitive inten- sity of the contemporary fundraising environment wherein donation patterns and opportunities are constantly chang- ing so that greater levels of resources must be devoted to attracting and retaining supporters

- the influence on the fundraising market of a handfbl of large charities which, through skilful marketing, have at- tracted donations possibly to the detri- ment of smaller organisations.

Direct marketing (DM) has played a key role in the development of the UK charitable sector’s marketing efforts. For instance chanties in 1996 accounted for 11 per cent of the volume of all UK direct mail, second only to catalogue selling companies (1 3 per cent) and well ahead of both life insurance companies (7 per cent) and banks (4 per cent).8 Addtionally, large UK charities are known to be big users of telemarketing,’ direct response TY’O catalogue merchandising, and off-the-page response advertising. Reasons for the popularity and growth of DM among U K

charities include the growing and well- publicised evidence of its effectiveness,‘ reduced data-processing costs, changing donor demographics and lifestyles, es- calating above-the-line advertising prices, media fiagmentation, and the ability to measure precisely the impact of a specific hndraising campaign and the ‘lifetime values’ of individual supporters. DM is used by chanties to communicate with precisely targeted donor segments and, wherever possible, to address their in- dividual giving preferences. It is ideal for entering fresh ‘markets’, retaining existing donors and recruiting new givers.” In- creasingly, moreover, DM is employed for ‘relationship fundraising’, ie building long- term one-to-one relationships with sup- porters via the provision of information to target individuals without necessarily asking them for money (eg through thank-you letters, news sheets, invitations to open days or special events, etc). Abdy (1997)” argued that ‘a high proportion of charitable supporters are hungry for information about the chanties they support’ (p. 212). and that DM is a hghly effective means of delivering this information.

Database marketing is common within the Charitable sector. Bennett and Gabriel (1998)13 found that 64 per cent of a sample of 164 of the UK’s top 1,500 chanties employed the method. They use it predominantly for attracting, maintain- ing and re-activating donors, but also for building long-term relationships with sup- porters, for merchandising, for tracking individual giving behaviour, and for con- structing donor scoring systems (ie assign- ing points to each donor according to his or her income level, fiequency of donations, etc, and then targeting in- dividuals whose points scores exceed a certain threshold value). Considering that the charitable sector constitutes the UK’s second-largest user of direct marketing services, and the extent and sophistication

of charity DM activities, it is not surprising that commercial DM practitioners view their charity counterparts with substan- tial respect.14 Commercial DM managers are particularly impressed with the high response rates attained by many charitable appeals and by the charitable sector’s in- novation and creative flair, efficient and effective inter-organisational exchange of information (especially mailing lists), and seeming ability to target precisely the right people in order to maximise revenues.

THEPRESENTSTUDY Despite the extent and importance of direct marketing by charitable organisa- tions, hardly anything is known about the characteristics of the people who manage this function within charities. Crucially, DM in a large multi-million-pound or- ganisation with a big DM budget (the median annual income of the top 100 UK charities in 1996 was A72.3m) is a specialist marketing function with ‘technical’ over- tones involving knowledge of, inter alia:

- list availability and construction - database administration - relevant computer software - donor behaviour - market (fundraising) trends - advertising media and creative strategy - media discount structures - market segmentation - mailing systems and procedures - tele-marketing -budgetary control -the structure of the DM services

industry (mailing agencies, fulfilment houses, etc).

In view of the very large DM budgets available to the marketing departments of big charities and the sophistication of their DM methods, it is not unreasonable to suppose that they employ some of the

country’s best direct marketing talent. Is it in fact the case that the ‘typical’ person in charge of a leading UK charity’s DM is a marketing professional well versed in the art of manipulating various promotional variables in order to optimise the returns to campaigns? Or is he or she more likely to be a general charity manager (without DM training or experience) who cir- cumstantially assumes responsibility for the role? How do charity DM managers per- ceive their hnction? What are their back- grounds and motivations, how are they remunerated, and how well do they fit into the administrative structures of their employing organisations?

Bond (1996)15 listed a number of factors allegedly encouraging top-class marketing people to work in charitable organisations, notably:

-personal commitment to a charity’s work (referred to by Bond as ‘altruistic buzz’)

- opportunities to devise genuinely original and creative campaigns and to manage big marketing budgets

- possibilities for rapid advancement - autonomy -the ability to gain high-level marketing

experience - a systematic closing of the gap between

corporate and nonprofit sector salaries.

To the extent that a willingness on the part of high calibre DM specialists to work in charities is matched by a growing demand for their services, it may be that the characteristics of charity DM managers increasingly parallel those observed in the commercial sphere. In particular, Reed (1997)16 alleged that a chronic shortage of skilled and experienced staff in the (general) UK direct marketing industry had resulted in very young people determining companies’ DM marketing strategies. Ths, according to Reed, was a

bad thing because managers with just four or five years’ work experience could not possess the breadth of knowledge necessary for taking important strategic decisions. Also their acquaintance with other organisations would be extremely limited. Junior DM executives were being promoted well before their time, Reed asserted, and their wages were unnaturally high. Reed attributed this (presumed) situation to the recession of the early 1990s, which had caused f m s and DM agencies to stop recruiting and to curtail drastically their DM training activities, thus arresting the ‘usual organic growth of available staff (p. 22). IS it the case that charity DM managers are similarly young, inexperienced, and not committed to their employing organisations? (It is known that technically specialist staff tend to stay in their jobs for shorter periods than others, see Earl and Skyrme, 1992.”) These are Some of the questions that the present study addresses.

Adjustment problems If the typical DM manager in a large charity is a specialist DM professional, arguably he or she is likely to experience difficulty in relating to the charity’s other managerial employees due to the possible existence of an anti-marketing culture within certain parts of the organisation. It has been suggested that many senior employees within charities believe that a charity should focus exclusively on its philanthropic work, not on the develop- ment of innovative marketing campaigns and Hence, for example, promotiond imagery that ‘tugs at the heartstrings’ has been accused of re- inforcing negative public stereotypes of beneficiaries. Disabilities charities in par- ticular have been censured for producing highly emotive advertisements, which in &ct demean disabled people. Other objec- tions to charity advertising may derive

from the pre-assumption that anything gained by one charity is necessarily lost by others, and that hard-htting promotions could create among potential donors feelings that their contributions will be spent merely on additional advertisements and not help the charity attain its philanthropic objectives. Such perceptions might induce a charity’s top management to put non-specialists in charge of the marketing (including DM) function, al- though there is a growing body of (largely anecdotal) evidence to suggest that this is unhkely and that, in general, the ‘commer- cial’ approach to charity management is by far the more common. Marsden (1996),2” for instance, found that many U K charities were unnecessanly narrowing their field of recruitment for management committee members by focusing only on people with business skills. Likewise, Cervi (1996)21 reported evidence fi-om the early 1990s indicating that fewer than half of all senior management posts in large UK chanties were filled with ‘home grown’ managers, the rest having been imported from the commercial world.

Hybrid managers I t has been suggested that managers with a specialist functional expertise in a field such as direct marketing are able to wield power within organisations2* and to control patterns of activities by virtue of their access to specialised skills and knowledge. On the other hand, functional specialists might be marginalised by (hos- tile) colleagues and thus find it difficult to play an influential role. Indeed, Hales and Tamangani’s (1 996)23 extensive review of the academic literature concerning the degree of autonomy given to managers in specialist units concluded that most of the evidence indicated that devolution of operational decisions to (specialist) unit level was normally accompanied by tighter control over activities, and that this creates

a ‘fi-eedom to succeed, but not to fail’ environment (p. 736). The ’hybridisation’ of specialist managers has been advocated as a convenient method for integrating hnctional experts into wider organisa- tional systems and for optimising their performan~e.~~ A hybrid manager is one who combines technical competence with business understanding and organisa- tional knowledge and s k ~ l l s . ~ ~ The in- dividual occupies a role wherein technical competence is balanced against general managerial ability. A hybrid could be a specialist who acquires general manage- ment skills, or a generalist who learns about and assumes responsibility for a specialist hnction.2h Discussion of this issue arose because of the expression of concerns that technical information sys- tems managers (people of great importance in large business organisations) were not integrating easily into conventional administrative structure^.^^ Analogously, Petrison and Wang’s (1993)27 review of pre-existing literature on interactions be- tween marketing and technical database personnel concluded that there existed much potential for confhct between the two groups. Among the factors creating relationship difficulties were differences, inter alia, in the ages and lengths of tenure of employees, their educational and other backgrounds, cultures and departmental goals. Stereotypes of the other parry were also important. Senior managers attempted to view the ‘big picture’, whereas sys- tems staff adopted more task-centred approaches.

Hybrid managers can be developed via job rotation, on- and off-job training, and through planned experience across a variety of managerial tlnctions. The justification for hybridisation is the as- sumption that no amount of interaction between separate disciplines can achieve the same degree of integration.*’ Hybrids are said to facilitate communication

within organisations, to bridge cultural and political gaps between departments, and to encourage proactive attitudes towards change and innovation. Earl and Skyrme (1992)” suggested three hn- damental competencies characteristic of the hybrid manager:

- sound motivation and communication skills

- familiarity with the employing or- ganisation’s culture, structure and processes

- knowledge of specific tasks undertaken by a business.

However, it is not clear whether it is better for specialists to acquire general manage- ment competencies, or for generalists to learn about a particular technical hnc- tion. According to Robson (1994),26 it is ‘easier to add technical knowledge to a base of business awareness than to incul- cate technicians with a broader organisa- tional vision’ (p. 336). Arguably, general line managers find it relatively easy to take over a specialised function because line managers tend to have superior in- terpersonal skills and wider perspectives than people preoccupied with technical issues.25

METHODOLOGY The present study was necessanly ex- ploratory in nature because, apart fkom a handhl of (largely anecdotal) s m a l l - sample surveys, few substantial empirical investigations have been undertaken in the area and very little is known about relevant issues. Accordingly, the aim of the research was to discover significant variables and the natures of the relationships between them, and hence to lay a foundation for subsequent more rigorous quantitative testing of hypo these^.'^ Thus, a mail ques- tionnaire was drafted and pre-tested via:

(9

(ii)

discussions with the direct marketing managers of three of the UK’s leading fundraising charities a sample mailing to 50 of the UK’s largest charities selected at random fi-om the 250 top charities (by annual income) listed in ‘Henderson’s 2,000’ (Hemmington Scott Publishing).

This led to improvements in the wordings of particular questions and the removal of outlying items that failed to correlate significantly with any of the groupings of questions representing various dimensions of the analysis. The final version of the questionnaire is shown in Table 1, whch also gives a breakdown of the responses to the first two sections. Section 1 of the questionnaire assessed respondents’ per- ceptions of how seriously marketing and direct marketing were taken by the senior managements of their employing organisa- tions. Section 2 contained questions relating to personal motivation (item 2(d)); remuneration (items (1) and (i)); and characteristics commody associated with hybrid managers (items (a) (b) (c) (e) (4 and (g), cf: Earl and Skyrme, 1992;’’ Robson, 1994).26 The items concerning remuneration did not request details of salary levels, as pre-testing had revealed that such enquiries would greatly reduce the number of responses. Section 3 of the questionnaire asked for personal informa- tion about the individual respondent, focusing on his or her DM and other experience, responsibhties, training and educational background.

The find questionnaire was mailed to the ‘Head of Direct Marketing’ in the 200 largest UK hndraising chanties (as listed in ‘Henderson’s 2000’) which had not been included in the pre-testing. Eventually 115 replies were received (46 per cent of the 250-strong sampling frame), which is con- sidered satisfactory as this rate of response was (at least) as high as those acheved by

empirical studies completed in collateral areas. A letter was sent to a sample of 50 non-respondents asking why they had not replied and enclosing a slip upon which they could tick a reason. After telephone follow-ups a total of 29 replies were received, the analysis of which did not reveal any systematic biases u i d - u i s the types of charity whose respondents had actually completed the questionnaire. The main excuse given was ‘too busy’ (34 per cent), followed by ‘it is our policy not to reply to questionnaires’ (20 per cent) and ‘confidentiality’ (1 8 per cent).

RESULTS Respondent chanties had a median (1996) annual income of E22.9m (range E117m to A1 1.32m). There was a proportionately even distribution of responses from various charity sectors (health and medicine, animal welfare, overseas aid, etc), the major distinguishing factor among the responses being the job title of the individual concerned. Thirty-five of the 115 respondents (30 per cent) held the job title of direct marketing manager (or similar dedicated DM description); 47 per cent were called marketing (or findraising) managers or executives, while the remaining 23 per cent were known by a variety of other titles (eg head of external relations, appeals manager, donor develop- ment manager) typically implying that the holder of the position was more of a general charity manager than a quintessen- tially marketing executive. There were no discernible propensities for particular charity sectors to employ higher percentages of any one of these categories of job title than of others. The overwhelming majority of respondents were male (see Table 2), and most liked their jobs (see Table 1, 2(d)). Seventy-one per cent agreed or strongly agreed that their work provided much job satisfaction

Table 1: The questionnaire

Please indicate the extent to which you agree or disagree with each of the following statements. (SA = Strongly agree; A = Agree; N = Neither agree nor disagree; D = Disagree; SD = Strongly dsagree.)

Section 1: The roles of marketing and direct marketing within your charity

SA A N D SD % % % % %

(a) Direct marketing is taken very seriously by the senior

(b) Marketing in general is a highly valued hnction within this charity 23 39 16 14 8

(c) Although I am responsible for direct marketing within this charity, really important decisions concerning direct marketing are taken by people higher up in the organisation 20 15 10 42 13

management of this organisation 32 40 14 9 5

(d) As the person in charge of direct marketing I exert a

(e) There is an anti-marketing culture within this big influence on this charity’s marketing strategy 10 20 32 20 18

organisation 7 17 20 36 20

Section 2: About yourself SA %

A % -

N %

D %

SD %

(a) I regard myself as being more of a specialist in direct marketing than a general manager

(b) I have substantial managerial experience of functional areas outside marketing (eg administration, finance)

(c) I believe that my general management skills are greater than my specifically direct marketing skills

(d) I was attracted to work for this charity because: (i) I personally sympathise with its aims

(ii) My job provides possibilities for obtaining

(iii) The remuneration package is a good one (iv) My job gives me the opportunity to control a

(v) My job offers good prospects for rapid

(vi) My job gives me the heedom to innovate and

(vii) The duties associated with my post give me

high-level experience of marketing management

very large budget

advancement

develop creative campaigns

much job satisfaction (e) I have a good knowledge of key people in this

organisation and what makes them tick (r) My understanding of this charity’s overall operations

and administration is just as extensive as my knowledge of marketing practices and techniques

(g) Motivating others and communicating with them are among my major strengths

(h) I am fully familiar with this charity’s culture, goals and internal organisation

(i) My remuneration package compares favourably with what I could earn in the commercial sector

13 13 17

20

40

22

17

18 29 11

10 18 20 23 29

12 15 39 21 13

18 10

40 35

19 33

14 20

9 12

10

13

8

7

15

19 29 24

32

18

17 15 23

17 10 30 35

50 14 8 21

15 23 27 20

17

36

18

20

30

17

16

28

13

10

9

19

20

15

23

12

20

22

34

21 0) A substantial part of my remuneration is performance

related 7 10 10 42 31

Table 1: The questionnaire (continued)

Section 3: Training and employment

Please complete this last section by +ircling appropriate responses and by inserting appropriate words or numbers in the text.

m a t is your sex? (Male/Female)

How long have you been in your present job? (YeadMonths)

m a t is your present job title?

prior to joining your present employer, did your previous post involve marketing (Yes/No); did it involve direct marketing? (Yes/No)

If you held a position with your current employer prior to your talang up your present appointment, did the previous post involve marketing (YesINo); did it involve direct marketing? (Yes/No)

Does your charity employ a direct marketing agency? (Yes/No)

1s direct marketing your (please n.rcle): only responsibility/main responsibility/an important responsibility shared with other dutieda minor responsibility?

On average how many days of mining (of whatever form) do you receive from your employer each year?

If YOU have received training was this @lease circle): in-house/an externally provided short courselother (please specift)?

Have you received training in (a) direct marketing (Yes/No), or (b) marketing in general? (Yes/No)

If you have received marketing training how long did it last, and what form did it take: in-house/extemal

m e n you lefi full-time education what was the highest level of qualification that you obtained? 0 levels/GCSE; A levels/BTEC/GNVQ; HND or degree; Professional qualification (please s p e c i ) : MSc; PhD.

Did any of your post-school qualifications include separate courses or course units in marketing? (Yes/No)

Have you been through a job rotation system (a) with your present employer (Yes/No), or (b) with a previous employer? (Yes/No)

m a t is your age category? (21 or under; 22-25; 26-30; 31-35; 36-40; 41-50; 50 plus)

Note: The percentage figures do not relate to exactly the same number of respondents in every case because Some respondents failed to answer particular questions. Hence certain percentages are calculated on the basis of 112, 113 or 114 respondents.

course/other (please s p e a i ) .

(2(d)(vii)), with only 15 per cent disagreeing or strongly disagreeing with this proposition. Fif3y-eight per cent were attracted to their post because it offered possibilities for obtaining high-level experience of marketing management (2(d)(ii)); 65 per cent because it gave creative fi-eedom (2(d)(vi)); and 47 per cent in consequence of the ability to

control a very large budget (2(d) (iv)). Only a third of respondents thought their remunerations were as good as they could earn in the commercial sector (2(i)), although just less than a third believed that their remunerations were unsatisfactory (2(d) (iii)). Perfonnance- related pay was uncommon (2( j ) ) . It was clear that direct marketing was taken very

Table 2: Personal characteristics

characteristic Job title

Direct marketing Marketing/ Charity manager manager N = 35 N = 54 N = 26

fundraising manager (see text)

Sex: Male 79% 81% 83% Female 21% 19% 17%

Average age bracket 26-30 years Qualification level:

31-35 years 41-50 years

GCSEIO level 0% 7% 8% A level/BTEC 6% 12% 20% HND/Degree 74% 60% 57% Professional qualification 11% 9% 10% Post-graduate 9% 12% 5%

Average time spent in present job 1.5 years 2.9 years 4.4 years Average number of days of training received during the previous year:

General training 3.4 2.8 3.6 Marketing training 2.4 3.2 1.9

Remuneration perception score 2.8 2.0 1.7 Hybrid composite score 2.2 3.0 4.0

seriously within most respondent chanties (l(a)), and that marketing in general was a highly valued function (l(b) and (e)). However, respondents were more equiv- ocal about their abilities to influence their chanties’ overall marketing strategies (l(d)), while 35 per cent reported that really important decisions concerning DM were taken by people higher up within the organisation.

Table 2 shows respondents’ personal characteristics broken down with respect to job title. Clearly, the 35 dedicated DM managers were on the average younger (44 per cent were between 26 and 30 years of age) than their general marketing manager and general charity manager counterparts (58 per cent of the latter were over 41), and were better educated. Ninety-four per cent of the DM specialists had an HND, degree, professional or post- graduate qualification. General charity managers in charge of DM were the least well educated, but on average had been

in post for longer periods (4.4 years compared with 1.5 years for dedi- cated DM managers). One-third of the managers with a post-A level qualification had completed courses that included separate units on marketing. The Char- tered Institute of Marketing’s Diploma was the commonest professional qualification among those who had completed a professional course.

The ‘remuneration perception score’ quoted in Table 2 is the mean value of the response to the item ‘I was attracted to work for this charity because the remuneration package is a good one’ (Table 1,2(d)(iii)). Clearly, considerably more specialist DM managers regarded themselves as being well paid than did their more generahst col- leagues. All three categories of respondent received on average at least 5.5 days’ training each year. Eighty-five per cent ofall training days were completed in-house. This level of training compares favourably with other UK industry sectors. For

example, Storey et al.’s (1997)30 national survey of 904 UK businesses concluded that, on average, British f m s give 5.2 days of training to their managen annually. The average number of training days in com- panies that claimed to place high priority on training was 6.9 compared to 2.7 days within businesses that gave low priority to training.

Overall, respondents had substantial experience of marketing. Eighty-five per cent had previously occupied posts involv- ing marketing, 68 per cent involving direct marketing. Fi@-seven of the 115 managers had held other positions with their current employer, the remainder having been recruited from outside. Forty of these positions (70 per cent) had involved marketing. Few respondents had been through a formal job rotation programme, either with their present employer (15 per cent), or with a past employer (15 per cent). Typically, respon- sibility for DM was shared with other duties (this being the case for 46 per cent of respondents). O d y 18 per cent of the managers stated that DM was their sole hnction; 30 per cent reported that it was their ‘main’ responsibility. Sixty-five per cent of the respondents indicated that their charity employed a DM agency.

use of hybrid managers to administer direct marketing Section 2 of Table 1 contains seven items ((a) to (c) and (e) to (h)) based on the academic literature concerning the charac- teristics of hybrid managers (eg. Earl and Skyme, 1992;’’ Robson, 1994).26 Cron- bath's alpha was computed for these items SO as to assess the extent to whch they reliably measured the same construct. Item to total correlations were also examined. The alpha value for the seven items was 0.77, indicating sound reliability. Hence, each respondent’s scores for these items were combined to form a single scale,

referred to as the ‘hybrid composite’ score in Table 2. I t can be seen from Table 2 that there was a very large difference in the magnitude of this hybrid composite be- tween the 26 people with general charity manager job titles on the one hand (whose average score was 4.0), and marketing and direct marketing managers on the other (with average scores of 3.0 and 2.2 respec- tively). Clearly the specialist direct market- ing managers within the sample could not be said to possess hybrid characteristics. In an attempt to explore this matter further, a cluster analysis was completed to estab- lish compact groupings of respondents which differed significantly from each other v i s - h i s certain pre-specified at- tributes. The latter were selected conse- quent to an examination of the correlation matrix for the variables listed in Table 1 (see Sharma, 1996, pp. 186-18731 for a justification of this approach), and com- prised (in addtion to the hybrid score):

-the respondent’s age - respondent’s education level -respondent’s years in post -the degree to which marketing was

seen as a highly valued hnction in the respondent’s charity (see Table 1, l(b)).

A stepwise non-hierarchical clustering procedure was adopted using 2, 3 and 4 clusters respectively (via the K-Cluster &cility available on SPSS). The 3-cluster solution offered the clearest differentiation between the clusters. The overall R- squared value for the 3-cluster outcome was 0.812, indicating that the clusters were well separated and, by implica- tion, internally homogeneous (F = 72.91, p < .OOl). (Cluster 1 (see below) had the lowest root mean square standard deviation, suggesting that it was more homogeneous than the others.)

Inspection of the cluster means sug-

gested that the three clusters differed mainly with respect to the respondents' hybrid composite score, age, and the extent to which marketing was regarded as a highly valued function within the organisation. The first cluster (N = 34) contained mainly younger respondents with low hybrid composite scores and who worked in large charities where marketing was a highly valued function. Twenty-one of the 35 respondents with the job title 'Direct marketing manager' fell within this cluster. The second cluster (N = 31) was dominated by persons with high hybrid composite scores and who were older (typically between 31 and 40) and more experienced. Sixty-two per cent of the people in this cluster worked in charities in the bottom two-thirds of the size distribution of the sample. The mean score for the marketing orientation variable (at 2.2) was lower for cluster 2 than for either the first or third clusters (ie 3.2 or 2.8 respectively). Cluster 3 (N = 50) had managers with intermediate hybrid and marketing orientation scores, but who were older on average than persons in cluster 1 and had been in post for longer periods. Closer examination of the per- sonal characteristics of the respondents in the three groupings revealed that only nine members of cluster 1 had held previous appointments with their current employer, compared with 22 in cluster 2 (71 per cent) and 26 in cluster 3 (52 per cent). Also 19 of the 38 individuals whose post-school education had included separate units in marketing (50 per cent) were located in the first cluster.

CONCLUSION This exploratory study examined the characteristics of managers in charge of the direct marketing function in a sample drawn from the UKS 250 leading hndrais- ing chanties. It emerged that these

indwiduals were on the whole very well educated, well trained, and typicdy employed by organisations where market- ing was a highly valued function. There was little evidence of anti-marketing cultures in respondent charities. The amount of training received by respon- dents was at least comparable to that given to managers in 'best practice' UK com- mercial businesses. Overall, members of the sample experienced extremely high levels of job satisfktion and did not consider themselves to be badly paid. Freedom to innovate and to develop creative campaigns was seen as a major attraction of working for a charity. Three distinct clusters of DM manager could be distinguished. The fmt cluster contained younger people who were substantially more speciahsed than others (as indicated by relatively low hybrid composite scores) and who worked in very large charities with strong marketing orientations. Sixty- two per cent of the members of this cluster held the job title 'Direct marketing manager'; nearly half of all the individuals with this job title were in the 26-to-30 age bracket. Eighty-three per cent had a degree or post-graduate qualification; a further 11 per cent had a substantial professional qualification. On average they had been in post for less than two years. It was evident that these people had not been developed as hybrid managers. At the other end of the spectrum was a cluster of older managers with generalist manage- ment skills (evidenced by high hybrid composite scores) and with longer periods of service. It appeared that such individuals were typically charity line managers who had taken on the direct marketing function.

These findings lend support to the proposition" that an acute skills shortage in the direct marketing field has led to the appointment by many chanties of very young specialist DM managers who lack

experience, the problem being exacerbated perhaps by the large and rapid growth ofthe application of DM by the charity sector. This inevitably raises concerns about the possible isolation ofthe D M fbnction and its completion by people who in many cases will not possess the breadth of knowledge necessary to integrate DM strategy into a charitable organisation’s wider operations. T h e more experienced managers with high hybrid scores who were in charge of direct marketing did not, in the main, have the job title of ‘Direct marketing manager’, imply- ing that they were not dedicated DM specialists. Arguably this reinforces the conclusions ofRobson (1994),26 O’Connor and Sullivan (1995),25 and others that it is easier to convert an experienced line manager into someone who can look afier a specialist fbnction than it is to convert a hnctional expert into a hybrid manager. Further research is needed into the relative Success levels ofDM campaigns devised and administered by generalist charity managers as opposed to delcated D M specialists. Ifa charity’s DM performance is affected adversely by the absence of hybrid manage- ment skills in the person in charge of the function, it is clearly necessary for the latter to obtain a greater understanding of the roles of other departments and activities within his or her organisation. Teamwork and the involvement of D M speciahsts in multi-discipline task forces that oversee various aspects of a charity’s general mnagement might contribute significantly in these respects. Note also the low incidence of job rotation schemes evident within the sample. A more extensive use of job rotation could also help develop wider-ranglng managerial competencies among specialist DM executives.

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