Small charities reacted angrily when they heard the guest list for next week’s fundraising summit. Hugh Radojev says their anger is justified, up to a point.
When NCVO announced that only the 50 biggest UK fundraising charities were to be invited in person to its December fundraising summit, the news wasn’t met with great enthusiasm by small and medium sized charities.
When NCVO tried to explain it all away by saying that the top 50 fundraising charities had been invited because they were the ones being asked to stump up cash to help with setting up the new regulator, anger turned to full-blown rage.
Several objections seem to be almost entirely universal amongst small and medium sized organisations.
Small charities, big problems
Firstly; not being invited to attend the summit is viewed by many small and medium sized charities as tantamount to an admission from NCVO and the minister for civil society that their collective opinion doesn’t matter. This despite the fact that the review recommendations will affect small charities just as much, if not in some cases more so, than the UK’s biggest.
Secondly; there’s still a lingering sense of resentment amongst smaller organisations towards their larger compatriots, stemming from the events of the summer. It was the top 50 charities who were engaging in the kinds of industrial-scale fundraising campaigns that bought so much heat down on the sector in the first place.
No small, and very few medium sized charities, have the kinds of fundraising budgets to outsource work to external agencies, even on the kinds of contracts that the big boys were offering: demanding incredibly high returns on tiny overhead margins.
If small charities deserve less of the blame, they will carry as much of the can. It is small charities who will end up spending proportionately more on meeting new regulations - compliance costs, particularly for the mooted Fundraising Preference Service, are not much lower, however big your list of donors is.
Thirdly; while the individual charities themselves might be small, together they make up an enormous percentage of the voluntary sector collectively - well over 100,000 organisations. The top 50 control around half the fundraising income, however.
The size differentials alone seem to suggest that small and medium sized charities deserve, at the very least, to have a seat or two at the high table when it comes to the fundraising summit.
A logistical nightmare
For its part, NCVO says that it does care about smaller charities and has invited the Small Charity Coalition to the summit to prove it. The NCVO also says that representatives from smaller charities not invited in person will be able to watch a live-stream of the whole event on NCVO’s website on the day.
One can’t help but feel for the NCVO a bit in all of this. If nothing else, holding the summit seems to be nothing less than a logistical nightmare. From what we understand, the room in the Society Building (pictured) where NCVO are planning to hold the summit on 4 December seats 100 people.
If you factor in NCVO's own staff, the minister, representatives from the SCC, Acevo, the Information Commissioner’s Office, existing fundraising bodies, the new chair of the fundraising regulator and the Charity Commission then you’re almost down to standing room only already.
To include everyone who wants to come, you'd need a stadium.
Also, while NCVO will carry the can for this, much of the blame can probably be laid at the door of Rob Wilson, minister for civil society, who appears to have taken a rather high-handed approach to the whole affair.
Wilson, already notorious for refusing to attend sector events, is rumoured not even to be spending long at a summit to impose rules that he himself called for.
NCVO stepped in, voluntarily, to take on the can of worms this fundraising regulation has become, and seems to have become considerably more involved than it wished.
You suspect from time to time that Karl Wilding, the beleagured deputy leader who has made much of the running on this, would like to hand the whole thing back.
Communication breakdown
NCVO has also been at pains to stress that 4 December is merely an update on how applying the review’s recommendation is going. It is not the one and only chance for elements of the process or the final product to be debated or explained.
Yet, it’s easy to forgive the concern because, particularly when Sir Stuart’s review was first published, the fundraising summit was made to seem like a very big deal indeed.
Sir Stuart wrote that the summit should be held “as a matter of urgency”, that it should be attended by a “sufficiently representative group” of fundraising charities and that it would “be to formalise the necessary transitional arrangements,” of the implementation of the review.
That doesn’t sound like an update; it sounds more like the whole shooting match. But events have a way of changing, particularly when government intervenes. Perhaps the whole thing has ended up nothing like NCVO expected.
In the end, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating. It will remain to be seen just how much attention NCVO, the Office for Civil Society and the new regulator pay small and medium charities as this process limps on into the new year and beyond.
