In most industries the central commercial term is private. In this one it is filed. Connecticut publishes every paid-solicitor campaign with the contracted minimum percentage of gross going to the charity, the organisation, the method and the dates. Forty-two states run some version of the same regime.
That makes the number the first thing a prospective client can check, and the first thing a reporter or a regulator reaches for. Across 102 campaigns since 2021 you contract a median 38.0%. The median across the 7 Connecticut firms serving the same kind of organisation is 26.0%.
This report is about a fact that is already public and already in your favour, and about the one comparison that makes it stronger than a simple ranking suggests.
Every paid solicitor in Connecticut files the contracted minimum percentage of gross that will reach the organisation, campaign by campaign. It is published, searchable and free. A police benevolent association deciding between two firms can rank them on it in about a minute, whether or not anyone points them at it.
Contracting a high percentage on a handful of campaigns is a different achievement from sustaining one across 102. Small programmes can carry generous terms because the absolute numbers are small and the overhead is spread thin. Holding 38.0% at the highest campaign volume in the segment is the harder version, and it is the one the register can prove.
| What the register shows | Reading it kindly | Reading it carefully |
|---|---|---|
| You contract 38.0%, above the 26.0% median | You return more to your clients than most of the field | It is a contracted MINIMUM, not a measured outcome. The register does not publish what each campaign actually delivered. |
| You do it across 102 campaigns | The highest volume in the segment | This is the part competitors cannot answer quickly: rate and volume together take years to build, and the register proves both. |
| Your closest competitor on volume contracts almost the same percentage | Effectively level on rate | Which makes volume and filing history the separation, not the percentage alone. |
Ranked naively, Connecticut's register puts several very large firms near zero percent to charity, which would appear to make almost anyone look generous. Those firms raise for universities and large national charities and are paid fee-for-service, so the contracted minimum-to-charity is a nominal floor rather than the commercial term. They are not worse operators. They are a different business.
| Forward play | What the record prices it at | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Compete by raising the percentage you contract | You are already above the segment median at 38.0% against 26.0%, and the two firms above you run a fraction of your volume. Raising further would spend margin to win a comparison you already win on the axis that matters. | Rejected |
| Undercut competitors on price to the organisation | The commercial term in this industry runs in the opposite direction: what you keep is what the client sees as their cost, and it is filed. Competing downward here is competing on the one number the state publishes about you. | Rejected |
| Compare yourself against every Connecticut solicitor | It would flatter you and it would be wrong. 20 high-volume filers raise for universities and national charities on fee-for-service terms, so their near-zero contracted minimum is a different contract rather than a worse deal. A comparison that collapses the first time somebody checks is worth less than none. | Rejected |
| Expand into neighbouring states | Forty-two states require registration before soliciting, so entry is a compliance project before it is a sales one, and your filing history, which is the asset this report is built on, does not travel with you. It would trade a provable position for an unprovable one. | Rejected |
| Lead with longevity and client relationships | Unverifiable by a prospect at the moment of decision and claimed by everyone. The filed percentage and campaign count say the same thing and can be checked in a minute, which makes the softer version redundant. | Rejected |
| Diversify away from police, fire and veterans causes | Category concentration is a real single point of failure, since donor sentiment moves against a cause rather than a firm. But nothing public shows what share of your revenue rides on it, and the specialisation may be the asset. Only your figures decide it. | Untestable |
| Move into digital solicitation | Connecticut expanded the statutory definition of solicitation to include electronic and online requests effective October 2025, so digital work is now regulated and reportable here. Whether it suits your model is not something the register can answer. | Untestable |
| Use the register to see which clients moved and where | Genuinely valuable and nearly free. The register names the organisation and the firm for every campaign, so any client that left can be traced to whoever gained them, or to nobody. It is second only because it is analysis rather than an action, and the action below can start today. | Second |
| Put the filed percentage in front of every prospective client | The only asset here that is verified by the state, favours you, costs nothing and cannot be answered quickly by a competitor. 38.0% against a 26.0% segment median across 102 campaigns, more than the firms above you on rate run put together, all of it checkable by the board you are pitching in about a minute. | Pursue |
Filtering to firms whose clients are mainly police, fire and veterans organisations leaves 7 genuine competitors. That is the comparison in Part 1, and it is a materially harder one than the unfiltered ranking would have been.
Because registration precedes solicitation, absence from a state's register is evidence of absence from that market. We searched the machine-readable registers available to us, 1 of them, and found no RGL registration. In the same register, 3 Connecticut-based paid solicitors do appear, so firms from your state do register elsewhere when they work there.
It also points at something usable. If you ever wanted to know which competitors are expanding, the same registers answer it, state by state, without anyone having to tell you.
First: a contracted minimum is not what was delivered. True, and stated plainly. The register publishes the floor in the contract, not the outcome of the campaign. A firm could contract generously and underperform. We can see terms, not results.
Second, and strongest: a higher percentage may just mean thinner work. Returning 38.0% instead of 26.0% could reflect a deliberately lean operation, or campaigns that are cheaper to run, or simply lower margin. Nothing in the register shows your costs, so we cannot claim this is efficiency rather than sacrifice, and we are not going to.
Third: clients may not shop on this number. Possible. But it is the number the state chose to publish, the one consumer-protection guidance tells donors to ask about, and the one that appears whenever this industry is written about. A board deciding who to hire will encounter it whether or not they went looking.
Each play below was tested against the Connecticut register, the state registers we could reach, and published guidance on how this industry is regulated. Where a play needs numbers only you hold, it says so.
One line: the state's own register shows we contract a median 38.0% to our clients across 102 Connecticut campaigns since 2021, against a segment median of 26.0%, and here is where to look it up. Not a brochure claim. A filing, with directions.
That is free, it is already true, and it is the one asset in this business a competitor cannot answer in the room. They would have to change their contracts and then wait years to build the filing history.
If a finding here is wrong, telling us so is worth as much to us as the numbers. This is built from a state register and a segmentation judgement, and you are the only person who can correct the judgement.
We are Scalable OS. We work with public records: state charitable solicitation registers. From those we reconstruct from them what is actually happening inside a business and the market around it. Then we send that to the business, unsolicited, before there is any relationship at all.
The reason is straightforward. The analysis in this document is the kind that normally arrives after a retainer, a discovery phase and a scoping call, which means most independent operators never see it at any point in their working lives. It is not expensive to produce, because the underlying records are public and free. It is that nobody has a reason to produce it for you until you are already a client. We would rather demonstrate the work than describe it.
There is a second reason, and it is the one that decided the shape of this document: nothing in it was requested. A search engine or an assistant answers the question you thought to ask. This report exists to raise the ones nobody inside your business has had a reason to ask, because you know your own contracted terms; only the register tells you where they sit against everyone else's.
The change is a sentence; two numbers would take it further
Send us The figures below, each one an input to a number this report could not compute from the public record: percentage to charity on each of the firm's own filed campaigns, three years; proposals sent versus contracts signed, by year; the fee structure quoted on the last ten proposals; gross raised and cost to run, per campaign, for campaigns already filed: the register publishes contracted terms and never outcomes. and we will send back this same review rebuilt on your actual numbers: