We haven’t been hacked, says Fundraising Regulator

The watchdog says its databases have not been broken into by scammers, after reports came in that a number of charities received invoices purporting to come from the regulator

The Fundraising Regulator has said there is no evidence that its databases have been hacked after charities were contacted by scammers posing as the regulator and requesting payment for the Fundraising Preference Service.

The regulator sent out a warning about the scam on Tuesday after several charities received a poorly written email suggesting that the charity was due to pay an invoice for the costs of the FPS.

The costs of the FPS, which enables people to block communication by post, telephone, email or text from specific charities, are being covered by the voluntary levy that has been paid by the majority of charities that spend more than £100,000 a year on fundraising.

A database manager at one of the charities that was targeted by the scam told Third Sector the email address that received the request for money was a personal one that was not publicly linked to their work at the charity.

The manager, who asked not to be named, said they thought it was likely that the email had also been sent to their work email address, but the charity’s spam filters had blocked it.

“I’m the primary contact for the Fundraising Regulator, and it seems strange to me that the scammers targeted exactly the right person and knew to send it to that account,” the person said.

Although the manager acknowledged that their personal email address was available in the public domain, they said it was never linked specifically with their role at the charity and did not appear on the charity’s website.

It might be possible for someone to piece together their job with the email address, the manager said, but this would require more time and research by the fraudsters than was typically seen in such scams, especially given the number of charities believed to have been contacted.

“There is a very narrow list of people who have that address in connection with my job,” the manager said. “But when you register with the Fundraising Regulator you have to give a second address, so they are on that list.”

But the regulator rejected the suggestion that the scammers had used its database to work out who to target.

A spokeswoman for the regulator said: “There is no evidence to suggest that the Fundraising Regulator has been hacked. All the email addresses used by the scammers are ones that are in the public domain.”

She said the regulator had not notified the Information Commissioner’s Office because there had been no breach.

The database manager said it was also possible that the Institute of Fundraising had the email address that was targeted.

A spokeswoman for the IoF said she did not believe there had been a data breach at the IoF, but was unable to confirm this in time for Third Sector’s deadline.

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Fraudsters target charities with invoices for the Fundraising Preference Service

The Fundraising Regulator has warned charities to be wary of any email that demands payment for the FPS, which is already covered by the voluntary levy paid by hundreds of charities

Fraudsters are sending charities invoices that demand payment for the Fundraising Preference Service, the Fundraising Regulator has warned.

The regulator alerted organisations to the scam today and urged those affected to get in touch.

“A number of charities have been invoiced fraudulently, although we do not believe that any have paid money,” a spokesman for the regulator said.

He said the spoof messages came from an email address not registered to the regulator’s @fundraisingregulator.org.uk domain and contained a link to an external website.

The regulator had alerted the national fraud centre Action Fraud to the phishing attempt, the spokesman said, and was raising it with sector bodies including the Charity Commission, the Institute of Fundraising and the National Council for Voluntary Organisations.

The regulator has asked charities that spend more than £100,000 a year on fundraising to pay a voluntary levy to cover the Fundraising Regulator’s costs, which includes the operation of the FPS.

The regulator started the FPS this year to allow people to block post, telephone, email or text communications from named charities.

The amount that charities have been asked to pay by the regulator for the levy varies according to how much each organisation spends on generating voluntary income.

The spokesman added: “The Fundraising Regulator will never issue an invoice for the FPS, since it is funded by our levy. If you know or you believe you have received one of these fraudulent FPS emails and have concerns, or if you have any questions, please get in contact with us on 0300 999 3407 or at [email protected].

“We would also like to ensure that those organisations that fall within the scope of the fundraising levy do not assume the invoices we are currently sending for year two are in any way associated with this fraudulent scheme.”

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Fundraising Regulator publishes list showing levy non-payers

It includes 162 charities that have not yet paid up to £15,000 a year to cover the regulator’s costs

The Fundraising Regulator has published a list showing 162 charities that it says have not paid the fundraising levy.

Those listed as having not paid the levy include the English National Opera, the anti-poverty charity War on Want, the conservation charity Plantlife, the mental health charity YoungMinds and Devon Air Ambulance.

Others listed as having not paid the levy, which is voluntary, include BirdLife International and the think tanks Policy Exchange and the Institute of Economic Affairs.

The list includes 1,570 organisations in England and Wales that have been asked to pay up to £15,000 a year to cover the regulator’s costs, with the majority listed as having paid their share of the levy. 

But it does not include the names of 95 organisations that the regulator said it was in negotiations with over paying the levy.

Thirteen of the 162 charities that the regulator has identified as not paying the levy are marked as having agreed to pay the levy for year two but have not paid the year-one fee.

Charges levied on charities range from £150 a year for those spending between £100,000 and £149,999 per annum on fundraising to £15,000 for those that spend more than £50m a year.

Heléna Holt, chief executive of Devon Air Ambulance, said the charity did not intend to pay the levy because it did not provide the charity’s donors or beneficiaries with value for money.

She wrote a blog on the charity’s website in June in which she detailed the reasons why the charity had decided not to pay the levy and invited supporters to comment.

Holt told Third Sector that all the feedback the charity had received had been supportive of its decision to refuse to pay the levy, but this was constantly under review and the charity would pay if its supporters wanted it to.

A spokeswoman for the IEA said the charity did not intend to pay the levy. “This regulator was established after sharp and aggressive practices by some charities in fundraising,” she said. “The IEA doesn’t engage in such practices and has no intention of doing so. We have never received any complaint pertaining to fundraising that could be in any way helped or addressed by this regulator.

“If other charities have behaved so poorly they need to receive and pay for this sort of regulation, we wish them well. The IEA doesn’t fit this category, so we are not minded to pay for a service we don’t feel we need.”

A spokeswoman for the English National Opera said it intended to pay the levy and the Fundraising Regulator was aware of it. She said the charity had requested an invoice from the regulator in July.

The support charity Turn2Us is listed under its former name of Elizabeth Finn Care as having not paid year one of the levy but having agreed to pay year two.

A spokeswoman for the charity said it intended to pay the levy from year one but was in discussions with the Fundraising Regulator over what payment band it should fall into.

The children’s charity EveryChild is listed as having not paid, but Amanda Griffiths, chief executive of Family for Every Child, told Third Sector the request for payment had slipped through the gaps as a result of EveryChild becoming a dormant subsidiary of Family for Every Child last year. She said payment had now been made.

A spokeswoman for the Fundraising Regulator said: “Today, in the interests of transparency and fairness, the Fundraising Regulator has published a list that shows the charities that have paid or committed to pay and those that have not paid our year-one levy.

“The charities listed as non-payers include those that either refused to contribute to the levy or have not responded to our communications. The list will be updated to include charities with which we are still in negotiation, as and when they decide whether or not to pay. As such it is a live document. As always, we are grateful to those charities that have paid the levy and look forward to continued collaboration in the future.”

Peter Lewis, chief executive of the Institute of Fundraising, said: “While it is for the board of each charity to decide their own position, we strongly encourage every fundraising organisation to show their commitment to high standards by paying the levy.”

Sir Stuart Etherington, chief executive of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations and whose review led to the creation of the Fundraising Regulator, said charities that paid the levy were demonstrating their commitment to fundraising good practice and therefore safeguarding their integrity and reputation.

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Most donors would not opt-in to future fundraising, research shows

Research by nfpSynergy found members of the public are suspicious of how charities use their data

Just 16 per cent of people would opt-in to being contacted about future appeals when donating to a charity, research by the consultancy nfpSynergy has revealed.

NfpSynergy conducted a set of focus groups in May this year to explore how the general public felt about the implications of the General Data Protection Regulation on charities and combined it with quantitative research from its quarterly public opinion tracking survey.

The GDPR is due to come into force in May 2018 and will require charities to prove that people have opted in to being contacted.

In a blog post published yesterday afternoon, Jo Fischl, head of public audiences research at nfpSynergy said the quantitative research had found that when people were asked to imagine they had just donated to their favourite charity and to fill out a consent form about the future use of the data.

Less than half (47 per cent) of respondents said they would opt in to hear more about what the charity did with their money, and only 16 per cent opted in to be asked to donate to future appeals.

Just 5 per cent said they would be willing to have their data shared with other, carefully chosen charities.

The research also found that in general the public believes that charities should be treated just as stringently as businesses if they break data-protection rules.

Fischl said the research shows the public unease about the use of data and demonstrated the vastness of the challenge of encouraging opt-in.

She said there was a tendency for people to feel that they are being taken for a ride by organisations over their data and that charities were not immune to such perceptions which creates “default position of suspicion when charities ask for personal data”.

She said that with donors reluctant to opt-in to contact, charities’ databases were likely to shrink and their incomes fall under GDPR.

Charities need to create a culture of transparency in order to navigate this, she said, in order to dispel the public’s suspicion and encourage them to donate.

The full report, GDPR – The Change That Charity Donors Want, is due to be made publically available in September.

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R Fundraising administrators to dissolve the company

Administrators for R Fundraising, the telephone fundraising and outsourcing agency that which closed with the loss of 99 jobs in 2015, have moved to officially dissolve the company.

The latest administrators’ progress report suggests there will be enough money to fund payouts to former employees, but not to pay the £1.6m owed to unsecured creditors.

The agency’s parent company, Fundraising Initiatives, which has since closed, announced the closure of R Fundraising in July 2015, saying “current market conditions” had given it no choice and that its position had become “untenable”.

Third Sector reported at the time that R Fundraising was understood to have been affected severely by the death of Olive Cooke in May 2015, with several large charity clients suspending or pulling out of their contracts with the agency.

The administrators, Begsby Traynor, filed notice at Companies House yesterday that the company would officially be dissolved.

In their initial assessment, the administrators said preferential creditors – the employees – were owed a combined total of £75,880 of arrears in wages and holiday pay.

The employees themselves will have received a payment from the Redundancy Payment Service at the beginning of the administration process. In the most recent administrators’ report, made in February, the administrators said there was likely to be enough to repay the RPS.

But it said: “Based upon realisations to date and estimated future realisations, we anticipate that there will be insufficient funds available to enable a dividend to be paid to the unsecured creditors.”

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The news comes just over a week after the fundraising technology and charity database consultancy Purple Vision announced in a statement on its website that it would cease trading and go into voluntary liquidation from 31 July.

The statement said: “The directors have concluded that, without further short-term funding, the business cannot continue trading with confidence that future obligations will be met, and have made the reluctant decision to close, rather than continue to trade and incur costs or make commitments that might not be honoured.”

The company had been in operation for almost 14 years when it closed.

“We realise that this news will come as a shock to everyone we have worked with over many years,” the statement said.

“By stopping at this time we have been able to ensure that all salaries are paid to date and to minimise the impact on those few trade creditors that exist. Even so, we realise that this decision will impact people’s lives and we very much regret the uncertainty that this will cause.”

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Virtual mass-participation fundraising events enter top 25 for first time

Cancer Research UK’s more traditional Race for Life tops the income list for the fourth time in a row, but the British Heart Foundation’s MyMarathon has come in at 19th on the list, raising £1m

Fundraising events in which people participate digitally rather than in person have entered the list of the top 25 highest-earning mass-participation events for the first time.

The participation event that raised the most money for charity in 2016 was Cancer Research UK’s more traditional Race for Life, which topped the list for the fourth year in a row with £48m raised, according to a report compiled by the events company massive.

Second on the list was Macmillan Cancer Support’s World’s Biggest Coffee Morning, which raised £29.5m. The grant-making cancer charity Walk the Walk came in third with £8m raised through its Moonwalk event.

Massive has been compiling the list since 2013, but this year has been the first time that virtual-participation events – in which people track their physical activity online to raise money and awareness of a cause – have made it onto the list.

The British Heart Foundation’s MyMarathon, in which people run the 26.2 miles of a traditional marathon at a time and place, and in a way, that suits them, was the 19th biggest fundraiser, raising just over £1m. And at number 21, CRUK’s Walk All Over Cancer, which allows people to complete walking challenges, also raised about £1m.

Macmillan also had a virtual event in the top 25: its Outrun event, in which people choose how far they will run over the course of a month, raised £902,000.

The report says: “Outside the top 25 we’ve seen virtual events launched by a range of charities, based around running, cycling and walking.

“Whilst these campaigns have significantly lower overheads than physical events, whether these types of activity can achieve the scale and longevity of their physical equivalents and how developments in technology will enhance these opportunities remains to be seen.”

Macmillan and CRUK dominated the table, accounting for 11 of the events on the list and almost three-quarters of the total income reported by all the events combined.

Events that had been running for more than 10 years made up a third of the table and accounted for 76 per cent of the income, but 10 of the events featured had begun since 2012.

Although these newer events account for a total of only £25m of fundraised income, the report says their income is growing while income for the older events tended to fall in 2016.

The fastest-growing events were the Alzheimer’s Society’s Memory Walk, which grew by 69 per cent to raise £6.6m, Macmillan’s Brave the Shave, which grew by 62 per cent to £7.2m, and another Macmillan event, The Longest Day, which grew by 39 per cent to £1.6m.

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Fundraising Regulator appoints partner to help ‘vulnerable’ people with FPS

The Fundraising Regulator has appointed Yonder Digital Group to provide telephone support to the Fundraising Preference Service.

Yonder will offer its services to “vulnerable” people wishing to register their preferences with a live agent rather than use the online service. 

The FPS, which will enable people to block post, phone, email or text communications form named charities, was officially launched earlier this month. According to the regulator, 4,015 suppression requests were made in the first six days of launch.

The regulator said Yonder had been chosen to help provide the service because its staff had been specifically trained to work with vulnerable callers. The company will offer a supportive service to callers via a team of ‘brand ambassadors’.

Nick Allaway, head of finance at the Fundraising Regulator, said: “The FPS is a website based service which will give the public the chance to manage all direct marketing communications from a specific charity.

“However, we are fully aware that some members of the public, particularly those not familiar with using online services, will want to just pick up the phone to specify their preferences.

“Therefore, having an alternative contact method was critical. Yonder Digital Group, with its technology, expertise and highly-skilled contact centre agents was able to offer this additional support.”

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Fundraising Regulator will name charities that have not paid its levy

Of the 1,768 charities that have been asked to pay the voluntary levy to fund the regulator’s costs, 200 have either refused or ignored requests for payment

The Fundraising Regulator will, at the end of August, name the charities that have so far failed to pay the fundraising levy, it announced today.  

The regulator said it would publish a list at the end of next month, the close of the first levy year, disclosing the names of the eligible charities that have and have not paid the levy. All charities that spend more than £100,000 a year on fundraising have been asked to pay the voluntary levy, which covers the regulator’s running costs.

The regulator said today that of the 1,768 charities eligible to pay, 1,344 had paid or committed to paying, 224 were in negotiation with the regulator about payment, 35 had declined to pay and 165 had not replied. 

The decision to name the organisations that have not paid comes after Sir Stuart Etherington, chief executive of the National Council for Voluntary Sector Organisations, called on the regulator to “name and shame” the non-payers. Etherington conducted a review of fundraising self-regulation in 2015, which called for the creation of a new Fundraising Regulator after the national press criticised fundraising practices.

On 10 July, the regulator published a list of all those organisations that had registered with the Fundraising Regulator, but it did not include the names of the eligible charities that had not. The existing register includes charities that have paid the levy and those which, because they spend less than £100,000 a year on fundraising, fall outside the levy but have registered their support.

The Fundraising Regulator said in statement today that its board had concluded it would be in the interests of transparency and fairness to disclose the complete list of those charities that had and had not paid.

It said that before doing so it would contact all non-respondents again and had asked the NCVO and the Institute of Fundraising to contact the small number of those that are their members to encourage them to pay the levy. The list will also be shared with the Charity Commission.

Lord Grade of Yarmouth, chair of the regulator’s board, said: “The public generously supports charities, so their commitment to good fundraising practice is of vital importance. For charities spending more than £100,000 a year on fundraising, paying the levy is a very clear sign of their commitment to ensuring the maintenance of excellent fundraising standards and professionalism.”

Etherington said that paying the levy demonstrated a commitment to good practice and showing the charities that had paid and the small proportion that had not was fair to all concerned. 

Peter Lewis, chief executive of the Institute of Fundraising, said: “Fundraisers absolutely want the Fundraising Regulator to succeed. I would encourage all fundraising charities to sign up to support the regulator and pay the levy as appropriate.”

The proposal to name and shame organisations has faced opposition within the sector.

Earlier this month, Jay Kennedy, director of policy and research at the Directory of Social Change, told Third Sector: “Naming and shaming is at best premature and at worst will just damage the sector’s reputation further with more crappy headlines. It could also damage the reputations of any charities that are unfairly castigated in print.”

Kennedy said some charities might not have paid because choosing to do so was a strategic decision for the board that they might not have been able to make yet. 

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Petition calls for Lord Grade to resign from Fundraising Regulator

The Change.org petition had 84 signatures this morning, including Ian MacQuillin of the Rogare think tank

An online petition calling for Lord Michael Grade to resign as chair of the Fundraising Regulator has garnered support from fundraisers after his comments in The Daily Telegraph and on BBC Radio 4 last week.

The petition, started two days ago on the petition website Change.org, had attracted 84 signatures at the time of writing and was started by a user under the name “Proud to be a Fundraiser”.

The petition comes just days after the regulator confirmed that Grade’s term as chair, which was initially an interim appointment up to January 2016, had been extended until the end of 2018.

Grade attracted criticism from sector bodies last week after saying in a national newspaper article that too many charities were “proving to be laggards” and were failing to address public concerns about fundraising.

He then appeared on Radio 4’s Today programme and gave out incorrect information about how the FPS would work, mistakenly saying it would allow people to block contact from all charities at once, rather than specific charities.

He has previously described fundraising as “the Wild West” and fundraisers as “rogues and cowboys”.

The petition calls on Stephen Dunmore, chief executive of the Fundraising Regulator, to “initiate a process to replace Lord Grade immediately and find a chairman who is willing and able to represent donors and not-for-profit organisations responsibly”.

The person who started the petition, who did not wish to be named, told Third Sector they were not expecting to attract thousands of signatures, but it was “a gesture of support” for a strong relationship between the Fundraising Regulator and the fundraising community.

“It’s not just to stir things up for the sake of it,” the person said. “Having the regulator is critically important and every fundraiser I speak to recognises that, but having that trust of the regulator, the donor and charities is the fundamental basis of moving forward.”

The person said Grade’s comments had been “disrespectful and myopic” and risked “forcing a wedge rather than forging a bond” between donors, charities and the regulator.

The text accompanying the petition describes the extension of Grade’s term as unacceptable, describing his comments as “broad sweeping statements to deliberately court controversy and fan the flames of division and discontent”.

It warns that Grade’s comments could result in charities becoming wary of engaging with the regulator, believing they would not get a fair hearing, and donors being put off making donations.

Ian MacQuillin, director of the fundraising think tank Rogare, was among the signatories.

In his comment on the Change.org website explaining why he had signed, he said: “I reluctantly made a call for Lord Grade’s resignation because I believe his public comments, which showed contempt for fundraisers and a lack of knowledge of his own organisation, mean he is bringing regulation of fundraising into disrepute at a time when we need a leader of the regulator who can build bridges and consensus, and regulate with the sector, not at it, to rebuild public trust in fundraising.”

The Fundraising Regulator declined to comment.

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