A company with close links to Fundraising Initiatives Ltd, which went into administration on Friday, has applied to become a provider member of the PFRA and has already won a contract to deliver fundraising services.

A spokesman from the Public Fundraising Association has today confirmed that Capll Ltd applied to become a member of the regulatory body yesterday, and that its membership will go to its next board meeting which is due to take place at the end of November.

Capll Ltd has existed since 2009 but has not previously operated directly as a face-to-face fundraising agency. Instead it is believed to have acted as a subcontractor for other fundraising agencies.

Capll has close connections to Cathy Sullivan, director of Fundraising Initiatives and Person to Person Direct - another agency which has also entered administration.

Sullivan is not a director of Capll, but she is a director of Global Customer Acquisitions (GCA), in which Capll is a major shareholder.

Capll Ltd’s offices are registered to the same address as GCA, in Burnley, Lancashire. And a letter seen by Civil Society News suggests that GCA and Capll worked together to secure assets used by a marketing agency which worked as an FIL partner.

Until recently a representative of FIL sat on the board of the PFRA as a provider member.

The National Deaf Children’s Society has also confirmed that it has begun working with Capll Ltd on an “interim basis” until 24 November when the PFRA board meet to decide whether or not to allow the agency to become a provider member.

A spokeswoman said: “From our perspective the dates have just coincided. The NDCS will only be working with Capll up until that date [November 24] as an interim safeguard measure”.

FIL employed over 300 people, according to its website, and had an annual turnover of over £11m.

Only a few months previously Person to Person Direct, a subsidiary of Fundraising Initiatives Group, also purchased Future Fundraising which had gone into liquidation.

According to the administrators of both FIL and P2P, staff are unlikely to have been paid in full for the last month of work.

Fundraising Initiatives also purchased Dunfermline based telephone fundraising agency R Fundraising in January 2015. R Fundraising went into liquidation in late July with the loss of 99 jobs.

Civil Society News approached Cathy Sullivan for a comment, but had received no reply at the time of publication.

Update: Statement from Capll

The following statement was issued on 6 November by Capll Limited, in response to this story:

Capll Ltd had been working in long association with Fundraising Initiatives in donor acquisition since 2011 as a 3rd party supplier.  Capll has been trading since 2009 and is one of the largest providers of quality face to face recruitment to the charity sector across both regular giving via face to face and more recently in Lottery recruitment.

Unfortunately the face to face method faces an uncertain future, and Capll too has been impacted in the same way as many charities and suppliers and likewise has to follow the same process as all other creditors via the administrators.

Capll has ensured that any contract liabilities it held or GCA held have been honoured in full and Cathy Sullivan has been removed as a director of GCA with immediate effect. Cathy was not a shareholder nor has any association to Capll limited.

Capll’s aim is to try and ensure that the face to face fundraising method is not damaged irrevocably in what has already been an extremely challenging period for fundraising departments, aiming to limit the impact on the sector and most importantly charities.

Capll, who have a very strong trading history, has sought direct relationships with charities to deliver the income streams that are vital and retain the fundraisers in a time of high demand and limited supply and when other fundraising methods are challenged by events of earlier this year.

This also comes at a critical time when fundraising agencies are under immense scrutiny and regulations are changing to ensure higher standards of due diligence, Capll will also be ensuring that the fundraising agency and the third party suppliers are one organisation leading to higher standards of compliance, and professionalism in line with ever increasing sector regulations.