The chief executive of the Fundraising Regulator has said that charities must carefully consider how they use new powers to contact supporters in order to protect public trust in the sector.
Speaking at the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Charities and Volunteering yesterday, Gerald Oppenheim said his organisation’s upcoming guidance on how charities can use “soft opt-in” powers to contact supporters would be “absolutely clear about the dos and don’ts”.
The soft opt-in powers, due to be given to charities through the recently passed Data (Use and Access) Act, will enable charities to send electronic communications to a person without their consent if certain conditions are met.
Referring to the highly publicised death of poppy seller Olive Cooke a decade ago, which led to criticism of how charities shared her personal details, Oppenheim said “nobody wants to go back to the sort of problems that existed in 2015, that would be a real disaster”.
According to data published by the Charity Commission this week, trust in the sector dropped sharply between 2014 and 2016 but has since recovered, with 57% of the public now expressing high trust in charities.
At the APPG, Oppenheim said: “Public trust and confidence in the commission’s most recent survey is on the way up again, and we want it to stay that way.
“So the guidance that we’ll publish, probably later in the autumn, maybe the early winter, with the ICO [Information Commissioner’s Office] will, I hope, get others to sign up to it and give a clear steer to charities on what they can and cannot do.”
Tips on fundraising platforms
Oppenheim also said his organisation was engaging with large fundraising platforms after concerns were raised recently over how they ask donors to pay an extra voluntary fee to cover administration costs.
“Recently, we had a flurry of parliamentary questions from members of the Commons about fundraising platforms, largely commercial bodies, but the big ones are in our regulation,” he said.
“We're working with them to make sure they improve transparency to anyone fundraising on those platforms.
“But there are controversial elements of how they go about this, because as commercial bodies, they have to make money in order to reinvest in their systems, most notably the security of those systems, but they ask people to leave tips in addition to the donation.
“It's not always easy to set the tip slider – they usually have these little diagrams – line to zero. You can on one or two platforms, but not most of them. There is a way of doing it, but it's not that clear.
“So one of the policy team's challenges over the next few months is to work with fundraising platforms to make sure that it is clear that they comply with the new code that requires them as far as possible to do that, to make it clear and transparent so that people, if they're happy to add a tip, can do so.”
Oppenheim also repeated concerns about community interest companies (CICs) telling members of the public they are registered charities and raised concerns about the current CIC regulator’s ability to respond to bad behaviour.
He said he would speak about this to the chief executive of Companies House, with government plans for it to take over regulation of CICs.
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