A former director of the Institute of Fundraising has demanded an urgent review of charity telephone fundraising after a Channel 4 Dispatches programme claimed agencies are using dodgy practices to target vulnerable people.
Undercover reporters from the programme spent time working for the telemarketing companies NTT Fundraising and Pell & Bales.
While at NTT, call centre staff working for Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity were told to list a woman who did not want to speak because she was caring for a terminally ill daughter as a “soft refusal”, meaning she would be called again. Another NTT supervisor advised a member of staff not to remove a customer who was suffering from depression because they said that wasn’t a “get out of jail free card”.
At Pell & Bales, a manager on a campaign for the sight-loss charity RNIB told recruits they should pretend they had children to feed if anyone queried why they were not volunteers.
At both agencies, staff were given scripts in which potential givers were only to be told that staff were being paid after donors had made a decision to donate.
Former IoF director Stephen Lee said the IoF and Fundraising Standards Board should conduct a review of fundraising agencies.
He told Third Sector: “It’s inconceivable that a director of fundraising or the fundraiser responsible in the charity can’t have some understanding of what’s going on in an agency with which they have a contract,” he said. “That’s actually the most worrying element.”
Complaints about telephone fundraising soared by 26% according to the latest FRSB reports, rising from 6,379 last year to 8,019.
FRSB chief executive Alistair McLean said the organisation would be contacting the telemarketing firms involved to discuss the matters raised by the programme and consider whether further action was required.
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Charity telemarketers in the dock as Channel 4 exposes dodgy practices http://t.co/4PaPEkn7BU #telemarketing #directmarketing #CRM #data