Aggressive fundraising in the dock

Charities stand accused of doing little to combat the use of aggressive fundraising methods – such as chugging and door-to-door – despite introducing a raft of measures designed to tackle the issue.
Lord Hodgson, who last year completed a review of the Charities Act 2006, told a meeting of All Party Parliamentary Group of Civil Society and Volunteering that he is still receiving three or four complaints a week nine months after his review finished.
Hodgson said charities tended to dismiss public complaints or say they were a problem for someone else. He added: “The sector likes to pass the buck: ‘it’s not us, it’s the chuggers; it’s not us, it’s the door-to-door people’.
“When I started my review, I didn’t expect to find such antipathy to the way funds were raised,” he said. “The people don’t feel the sector responds in a cohesive way to public disquiet.
“The sector needs to do a great deal of work to restore public confidence in this area. If they do not, the problems they have now will be accentuated by a fall in public confidence.”
Hodgson claimed the public were also concerned about sector remuneration. He said he did not believe sector pay was excessive or that too much was spent on administration, but charities needed to convey this to the public.
“There is an educational job to be done if the sector is to continue to enjoy the extraordinarily high levels of public trust it has historically had,” he said.
Last year, the Public Fundraising Regulatory Association introduced new guidelines in an effort to drive up standards, and improve the public perception of face-to-face fundraising. However, the measures, included in the PFRA Rule Book (Street F2F) drew instant criticism for their leniency.
Charities and agencies receive penalty points of 20, 50 or 100 for breaching the rules – if an organisation receives more than 1,000 points in a financial year, it will face a fine of just £1 per point.
At the time, PFRA chief executive Sally de la Bedoyere said: “For a form of fundraising that is so regularly in the limelight, it is vitally important that fundraisers work to the highest possible standards in order to maintain the confidence of the public, media, and central and local government.”

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