A survey carried out by the Institute of Fundraising has found that 65 per cent of fundraisers think that once an individual is registered to the Fundraising Preference Service they should no longer receive “unsolicited communications”.
The IoF revealed the results of its survey on its blog yesterday, after asking its members about the Fundraising Preference Service, which was proposed in the Etherington Review.
Over 500 members took part and two thirds said they “thought that registering on an FPS should mean that the individual no longer receives cold ‘unsolicited’ communications”.
But 80 per cent of respondents believe that “consent from an individual should be respected” and that if an individual gives direct consent to a charity to be contacted by them, registering with the FPS should not “generally override that consent”.
Some 98 per cent of respondents said that the final implementation of the FPS should allow donors a “choice over what they receive (whether through communication channel, or relationship they have with a charity) rather than just one option of a ‘reset button’”.
Daniel Fluskey, head of policy and research at the IoF, who wrote the blog, said that the scope of the debate following the proposal of an FPS “shows that people care” and said that getting the right outcome is “crucial to the long-term sustainability of fundraising”.
Fluskey also suggested that the FPS ought to be “modelled on the Mailing Preference Service” – in that it is designed to stop ‘cold mailing’ with preventing organisations with previous relationships to contact individuals.
He wrote that the FPS “must be smarter and more attuned to people choices than only offering one option of a ‘reset button’” arguing that people “respond to different methods of communication in different ways”.
In the blog, Fluskey also said that the FPS needs to be given careful consideration to ensure that it properly protects ‘vulnerable people’, which was one of its stated aims in the Etherington Review.
The IoF has set up a discussion on its members forum where the discussion will be fed into its Policy Advisory Board and then on again to the working group that has been set up to help with the implementation of the FPS and other elements of the Etherington Review.
