Staff working for defunct agencies Fundraising Initiatives Limited and Person to Person Direct have not been paid for the last month of work, the administrator of the two companies has confirmed.
Fundraising Initiatives Limited (FIL) and Person to Person Direct (P2P) went into administration at the end of last month. According to the FIL website the two companies employed more than 300 staff.
Administrator Asher Miller, a partner at financial firm David Rubin and Partners, confirmed that staff had not been paid approximately a month’s wages.
Staff were not told of the administration until hours before the company closed, although senior individuals had known well in advance.
A senior fundraiser who worked for one of the FIL companies for seven months said: “The way this whole thing was handled behind the scenes was appallingly done. We knew nothing about problems until the administrators walked in and said ‘You haven’t got a job and you haven’t got paid.’ A couple of hours beforehand I spoke to a senior manager on the phone and was told everything would be fine.
“I’m out the thick end of a month’s salary and so are other guys. A lot of these guys are really struggling. They were earning a basic salary of a couple of hundred pounds a week, and they had the rug pulled out from under them on the day rent was due.
“What annoys me personally is that I was working 60 and 70 hours a week trying to make a go of this business, when they already knew it was likely to go down the pan.”
He said that the decision to close FIL reflected poorly on the fundraising profession.
“The industry has had such a tough time and it needs people in it to make it work,” he said. “I’ve spent the last few weeks persuading staff here that we’re doing good, that this kind of agency is an ethical place to work, that we can empower people to do good in the world. And then this happens. There were people here who cared, and they weren’t cared about.”
FIL is part of the Fundraising Initiatives Group, which at the start of the year owned seven subsidiary fundraising companies. Accounts are overdue for all but one company in the group - data services company Rapidata.
Two of those companies, Workplace Giving and Rapidata, continue to operate. A telephone agency, R Fundraising, went into administration earlier this year with the loss of 99 jobs. The status of the other two companies, Premier Contact and Fundraising Initiatives International, is not clear.
