A watched phone-in never rings

Fundraising | Gemma Ware | 1 Sep 2007

Charity telethons tend only to be considered a success if they top last year's fundraising total. Indeed, last year's BBC Children in Need raised a record-breaking £18.3m in one night. But with the recent flurry of headlines about faked phone-in competitions recently engulfing the BBC's Children in Need, Comic Relief and Sport Relief, will the public keep ringing in?

Research by PRWeek suggests nearly half may not. Pollsters Opinion Matters found that 44 per cent of 1,660 people surveyed said they would now be less likely to contribute to BBC charity programmes after the news of the phone-in scandals. Although Children in Need refused to speculate on what impact this would have on the charity's appeal total in 2007, it doesn't bode well.

The charities involved in the BBC affair have distanced themselves from the programme-makers and have passed the blame on to production teams behind the alleged competition-rigging. However, with trust and confidence so closely linked to the programmes, charities remain at the mercy of the producers.

Children in Need's chair Will Day is so worried he wrote to Sir Michael Lyons, chairman of the BBC Trust, to highlight the potential damage to the charity's brand. A reply from the BBC's editorial standards board detailed steps that are being taken to avoid repeats of the problem. Comic Relief said in a statement: "We hope that our supporters will continue to trust Comic Relief and understand that this story is about the internal workings of the BBC".

Yet the story will rumble on, especially now media regulator Ofcom has launched investigations into all three incidents. It has already fined the BBC £50,000 after it was discovered a Blue Peter phone-in competition raising money for Unicef had been won by a member of the studio audience after a technical hitch. Unicef emerged unscathed and was happy to remain Blue Peter's charity of the year, stating that it was satisfied the money it received had not been raised fraudulently.

Directory: Comic Relief | Unicef

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