The fundraising sector should carry out criminal record background checks on all prospective and existing staff to root out the “inappropriate element” currently being hired by fundraising agencies.
Speaking at the Institute of Fundraising’s Individual Giving Conference in London yesterday, James Davis, managing director of face-to-face agency Real Fundraising, said that charities and agencies alike should conduct “mandatory DBS background checks” on prospective and current staff members, as there is currently an “inappropriate element joining our providers”.
Davis said that Real Fundraising began conducting criminal record background checks on its existing staff “5 or 6 months ago”. Davis said it was one of the most “powerful and important decisions we’ve ever made as an organisation” and said that the agency found “a number of cases” where staff already working at the organisation had lied about having a criminal conviction during their application.
“The surprising thing that we’ve learnt in that time is that people do lie in their applications unfortunately, and this is something that we all need to be aware of. Even though we DBS check all new staff, we have had a number of cases where people aren’t disclosing criminal records when they join. At least we’re now in a position to catch that and rectify that by dismissing the member of staff.”
James said that, based on the evidence from his own organisation, agencies and even charities inadvertently hiring people with criminal convictions was clearly a sector-wide problem.
"What we can conclude from that is this is an issue that is industry wide and unless we all jointly do DBS checks we have to conclude that there’s an inappropriate element joining our providers. I think this is something we should collaborate as a sector on and have mandatory DBS background checks on all face-to-face fundraisers."
He predicted that background checks would become mandatory for all providers by law “at some point in the next 2 years”, and called on the sector to “get there first” to send a message to the public about best practice.
One of the key issues in the Sun’s exposé into the now defunct face-to-face fundraising agency Neet Feet centred on a number of fundraiser’s at the agency boasting about their criminal records and breaking the law while at work.
Liam McEntegart, co-managing director at Real Fundraising, said that the organisation was unable to provide figures around how many staff have been dismissed as a result of a DBS check at this time.
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