The Fundraising Standards Board’s report into charities and Olive Cooke makes grim reading, and shows a need for an urgent change in the sector's mindset, says David Ainsworth.

The FRSB has today published its report into charities’ treatment of Olive Cooke, the 92-year-old poppy seller whose suicide last year was the catalyst for widespread scrutiny of charity fundraising.

The report’s headlines are fairly stark.

• There was clearly a lively trade in Olive Cooke’s personal information. A quarter of the charities sampled had sold her data. Seven in ten had bought that data from someone else.
• Charities seem to have taken a contemptuous attitude towards donor privacy. Most assumed that anyone who had not proactively opted out of sharing their data had given permission for it to be shared. But most offered no easy way to opt out.
• Olive Cooke was being bombarded with mail by charities. There were 99 charities, just in the FRSB’s sample, who had her details on file, and 70 had mailed her. Between them, charities sent her 2,800 letters a year – around nine a day.

The report also casts rather a lot of doubt on a much-used argument among charities – that the family of Olive Cooke do not blame charities.

The family have issued a strong statement in today’s report. It gives clear backing to all the reforms proposed by the NCVO – including the controversial Fundraising Preference Service – and also backs the changes already introduced to the Code of Fundraising Practice. The family have made it clear that charities caused Olive Cooke distress, and that she would have been “very upset” to know that her details were being sold.

The FRSB is highly critical of charities’ conduct and its report is supportive of a need for the Fundraising Preference Service. It makes it clear that Olive Cooke was not an isolated incident, but that many other people were getting the same treatment.

It also calls for a change in how charities view donors, and appears to suggest that the charities which signed its code of conduct were at best paying lip service to it. Crucially, the report says a change in the rules is not enough. It says culture must change too, and it is right.

What does this mean?

This report is not good reading for the charity sector. For one thing, it’s not hard to see how this appears to a lay donor.

Olive Cooke was an incredibly generous woman, giving regularly to 48 charities, and charities’ reaction to that generosity was to bombard her with a ridiculous amount of letters and enthusiastically sell her details to others. The potential reputational damage to the sector is enormous.

The sector can of course argue that no one charity could have known of the cumulative impact. However I don’t feel charities can absolve themselves of blame.

Firstly, we could see this coming. FRSB complaints have quadrupled from 13,000 in 2009 to 52,000 in 2014. Direct donor contacts have more than doubled, with FRSB members sending 450m items of direct mail in 2014. Total donor contacts rose from 2.7bn in 2009 to 20bn in 2014. That’s not a sustainable growth.

Amazingly, charities have previously argued that it doesn’t matter that complaints have grown, because asks have grown too. That rather ignores the fact that they’ve massively increased the amount they’re annoying the general public. Why that is doesn’t really matter.

It ought to be charities’ responsibility to act collectively to not cause distress to their donors. It ought not to be enough to say “Well no one told us we couldn’t so it’s okay”. Charities lobby continuously for others to behave better than that towards their beneficiaries.

This kind of report smacks of charities treating donors with contempt. They have been seen as cash cows for the people who really matter – the beneficiaries – and beneficiary need has repeatedly been used as a justification for all sorts of shady practice.

Was it necessary?

Charities have repeatedly sought to justify the kind of boilerplate hothousing used on Olive Cooke because it makes money, and they need that money to serve beneficiaries.

It’s slightly disturbing in the first place to find charities quoting Niccolo Machiavelli, and saying that the end justifies the means. But more than that, does the argument hold water? Does this kind of practice really improve fundraising income in the long term?

I doubt it, because it erodes donor confidence in the charity sector. This kind of volume fundraising probably does work in the short term, but it must damage charities overall.

There is no evidence that the recent huge rise in asks has led to a commensurate growth in giving. It is more akin to an arms race between charities. There is no doubt that the charity which asks the most will also get the most. But there is no evidence that if everyone asks more, everyone gets more.

And we could have predicted – and indeed did predict – that this kind of behaviour, if it went on long enough, would eventually lead to government intervening and imposing on charities a series of onerous and difficult conditions which they are not happy with.

During the last few years three separate Parliamentary reports – one from the Public Administration Select Committee, one reviewing the Charities Act, and one specifically into fundraising regulation – have made it clear that reform was needed and that government would, sooner or later, have to intervene. So charities can hardly say they weren’t warned.

It is extremely unfortunate that small and medium-sized charities are likely to be tarred with the same brush as the few big organisations who consistently generated more than half the FRSB’s complaints, and for them there should be a measure of sympathy. Although given the number of charities named in the FRSB report, it appears a number of mid-sized bodies must have also been complicit in this process.

It will be interesting to see whether the new, stricter rules imposed on charity fundraising really lead to the massive drops in giving that some predict. Will the Fundraising Preference Service really cost £2bn?

Why have we ended up here?

It appears that charities have found themselves in a place which no one really wanted to get to – a treadmill involving more and more high-volume fundraising.

One problem is that donors tend to give all the money to the person who pesters them, but apportion blame among a lot of organisations. Charities are seen as a kind of union by the public, and they have trouble remembering which charity sent a particular request for money. Perhaps this is particularly unsurprising since the same face-to-face fundraiser can often be found on the same street in successive weeks raising money for different charities.

Another is that when a regulatory regime was designed to cover fundraising, it was made extremely weak – whether by accident or design. The FRSB, the putative regulator, didn’t set the rules and had no sanctions. All those who did set the rules were fundraisers. The FRSB was limited in how much it could push for more power, because no one at all was interested in listening to it. The ICO, meanwhile, has shown no interest in regulating data sharing among charities.

Put that together with a financial situation where there was a shortage of funds, together with an explosion in the technology needed to do this kind of fundraising and data sharing, and it’s not surprising that there was an explosion in the number of asks.

The fundraising sector has been in denial about the problem for a long time, and to a certain extent this is down to an institutional mindset the sector has to be wary of.

Fundraisers are overwhelmingly positive people. They are extremely loyal and effective team players, and very supportive of one another. These are great attributes – ones you need to have when asking for money, because that process involves getting turned down all the time.

But the same attributes make the community quick to clamp down on any negativity, wherever it comes from. Criticism, whether justified or not, is not welcome. And those people, inside and outside the fundraising sector, who have tried to suggest a need for reform, were for years largely silenced without debate.

Trustees and chief executives, meanwhile, have been largely absent from the debate, to the extent that in 2013 the then-chair of the Institute of Fundraising, Mark Astarita, launched an excoriating attack on both groups for failing to get sufficiently involved in the fundraising function.

My guess is that these individuals were keen to pass the buck for raising money, and then think about spending it. Fundraisers in turn were keen to pass the buck to agencies, who were driven by targets and in many cases appear to have had little feeling for the causes they raised cash for. 

This kind of collective failure to take responsibility, then, has led us to a situation where charities are being reviled in the press – sometimes fairly, sometimes not – and those who caused the problem through their inaction are still in many cases complaining bitterly about the solutions imposed on them as a result.

It is important, then, to take to heart the FRSB's recommendation that we need not just changes in the rules governing fundraising, but the culture as well.