The Advertising Standards Agency in 2014 received 1,047 complaints against charities as well as 540 complaints about donations and 352 about fundraising, according to figures produced yesterday.

The ASA’s annual report last week revealed that the regulator had received 2,466 complaints over non-commercial adverts, up from 2,127 the year before.

But it has now provided a breakdown of how many of these complaints directly relate to charities.

An interrogation of its database, provided by the ASA, reveals that these 2,466 complaints fall into 145 different “product categories”, several of which can be seen to relate to the charity sector.

As some complaints relate to more than one product category, there can be some degree of double counting.

Civil Society News has put in a request to the ASA for comparable data, but they had not provided this by the time of publication.

Adverts by Save the Children and the Royal British Legion appeared in the regulator’s list of the top ten most complained about adverts in 2014, the ASA announced in February of this year.

The Sainsbury’s Christmas Advert (pictured), run in connection with the Royal British Legion, was the fourth most complained about advert in 2014, receiving 823 complaints. A Save the Children advert featuring a woman giving birth was the fifth, receiving 614 complaints.

The ASA's annual report revealed that it received a total of 37,073 complaints throughout the year, its highest ever number of complaints, of these 60 per cent were formally investigated. The regulator said it saw an increase of 35 per cent in the number of complaints about online adverts.

Guy Parker, chief executive of the ASA, said that the increase in number of complaints was driven by social media.

The top ten categories in the non-commercial sector by number of complaints goes as follows:

Product category	Complaints
Charities	1047
Donations	540
Health	401
Fundraising	352
Political	322
Children	317
Government departments	317
Cancer	238
Information	196
Pressure groups	135