Charity Business appears to have had just 48 current clients, rather than the “over 200” that it claimed on its website, according to Cambridge House, the former Charity Business client that ended up with all the client data.
Clare Gilhooly, chief executive of Cambridge House, told civilsociety.co.uk that the data her charity acquired was all the data that Charity Business held. And it was the records of 48 charities, not 200.
The claim on the agency’s website seemed to be “creative PR” she said. “I think they were including in that figure quite a number of clients that they had maybe done one small job for, three years ago. It was a cumulative number.”
She was also surprised to learn that her charity was the second or third largest of Charity Business’s clients, as she had been given the impression that the outsourcing agency had a number of large clients.
Gilhooly won’t say who it was at Charity Business that handed Cambridge House the data after the outsourcing agency collapsed. “Throughout all this I have tried to only speak about our own actions and what we have done,” she said. “It is a matter of principle and what was important was us getting the data back to the other organisations - not getting waylaid with the ‘who done what’.
“If at some point in the future someone wants to say they handed it over, that’s their decision. I think they did it with good intentions in a difficult situation but I don’t feel it is appropriate for me to name them.”
Client data all mixed together
She explained that when her colleagues were presented with the opportunity to retrieve their own charity’s data, it became apparent that it was mixed up with other clients’ and they had no choice but to take all of it, or none of it.
Virtually all the data, except one disk that corrupted, has now been returned to its rightful owners. The corrupted disk is still with an IT specialist.
Cambridge House has incurred costs of around £8,000 so far in collecting and repatriating the records to the client charities, Gilhooly said. She added that she hoped some of the charities would be good enough to make a contribution towards this cost.
To read Tania Mason’s interview with Clare Gilhooly, click here.
