Lord Grade to stay on as chair of Fundraising Regulator

Appointed on an interim basis in November 2015, he will continue until the end of 2018

Lord Michael Grade will continue as chair of the Fundraising Regulator until the end of 2018, the regulator has confirmed.

Grade was initially appointed to the role in November 2015 on an interim basis, but his term was extended in January until the end of June. It has now been renewed a second time until the end of 2018, a spokesman for the regulator said.

Grade attracted criticism from sector leaders last week when he said too many charities were proving to be “laggards” in terms of improving their fundraising practices.

He then gave out incorrect information about the Fundraising Preference Service, mistakenly saying it would allow people to block contact from all charities at once, rather than specific charities.

A spokesman for the regulator said: “Initially board members were appointed for two-year terms. Their terms are now being staggered so that not all members retire at the same time.

“New board members – including, when the time comes, a new chair – will be recruited openly, as happened recently with the board member for Wales and as will be the case soon with a board member for Northern Ireland.”

Grade works as chair at least four days a month and is paid £500 for each day he works.

Stephen Dunmore, the regulator’s interim chief executive is also expected to remain in post until the end of the year, having previously agreed to stay until the end of September.

The spokesman said the appointment of a new chief executive would also be subject to open competition.

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IPPF refuses to pay levy to Fundraising Regulator

The International Planned Parenthood Federation says most of its fundraising activity does not happen within the UK

The International Planned Parenthood Federation has refused to pay the levy to fund the Fundraising Regulator.

The IPPF does not appear on the regulator’s register of charities that have paid the voluntary levy, published yesterday, and the charity confirmed to Third Sector today that it had not paid the levy and did not plan to.

All charities that spend more than £100,000 a year on fundraising are eligible to pay a voluntary levy to fund the regulator, but 370 charities of the almost 2,000 eligible organisations contacted by the regulator have not responded to the request or have outright refused to pay.

The IPPF, which campaigns on sexual health and rights, as well as providing advice and care in 172 countries, had an income of £76m in the year to 31 December 2015, and in the same year spent £3.6m on generating voluntary income.

But it said most of that fundraising activity had not happened in the UK.

A spokesman for the IPPF told Third Sector: “In line with options provided to the IPPF, we are not paying the voluntary levy.

“The IPPF receives almost all of its funding from governments, foundations and other institutions.

“Where private individuals’ contributions are received, that’s almost entirely through a separately led team: IPPF Western Hemisphere Region, based in the United States.”

Last week, Sir Stuart Etherington, the chief executive of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations called for charities that do not pay to be named and shamed, and last week the regulator said it was considering doing so.

The register published yesterday includes the names of all charities that have paid the levy, as well as those charities that are not eligible to pay it but have paid an annual fee of £50 to register with the regulator. It does not include those that are eligible but haven’t yet paid.

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Fundraising Regulator considering ‘naming and shaming’

Sir Stuart Etherington of the NCVO yesterday suggested that the regulator should go public with the names of those charities that had yet to pay its levy

– This story has been updated; please see final paragraph

The Fundraising Regulator is considering publishing a list of charities that have not yet committed to paying the fundraising levy, the watchdog has said.

At a reception to mark the first anniversary of the launch of the regulator yesterday, Sir Stuart Etherington, chief executive of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, called for the regulator to “name and shame” the 370 charities that had either refused or ignored its requests to pay the levy.

Charities that spend more than £100,000 a year are eligible to pay the voluntary levy, which funds the Fundraising Regulator.

Etherington said charities should be made to explain why they had not paid the regulator.

A spokesman for the Fundraising Regulator said today that Etherington’s idea was under consideration.

“We have not yet taken a decision on whether to name and shame non-levy payers, but this will remain under consideration by the board,” he said. 

Amanda Bringans, chair of the Institute of Fundraising, tweeted from the reception yesterday that she supported the idea.

But Jay Kennedy, director of policy and research at the Directory of Social Change opposed the idea, saying there were legitimate reasons why charities might not yet have paid up.

He 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. He called for the Fundraising Regulator and others to establish the facts and consider their approach.

“My suggestion would be that Sir Stuart, possibly with Vicki Browning, chief executive of the charity leaders body Acevo, as voluntary sector leaders, should schedule telephone conferences with the chief executives or chairs of the relevant charities to persuade them of the case, rather than assuming that the message has been heard, understood and accepted.”

A number of Twitter users suggested that naming and shaming might not be legal.

Reema Mathur, senior associate on the charity and social enterprise team at the law firm Stone King, told Third Sector: “The regulator would be wise to take advice before publishing any such list and be careful how it describes any failure to pay, to make sure it doesn’t fall foul of any regulatory or legal requirements or create any defamatory claims, for example.”

– A spokesman for the regulator originally said it was not considering naming charities but he subsequently said regulator’s board was considering the idea

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Almost 500 people access the Fundraising Preference Service hours after launch

According to the Fundraising Regulator, 484 suppression requests were made by 10.30am today, five and a half hours after the preference service began operating

Almost 500 requests to stop charities contacting people were made in the first few hours after the Fundraising Preference Service went live this morning.

At a reception this morning to mark the launch of the FPS and the first anniversary of the creation of the Fundraising Regulator, Jenny Williams, who sits on the board of the regulator, revealed that 484 suppression requests had already been made since it was launched at 5am today.

The FPS, which will be run by the regulator, will allow people to block all phone, email, direct mail and text contact from specific charities in groups of up to three at a time.

Speaking at 10.30 this morning, Williams said: “As of about an hour ago we already had 484 suppression requests since the website and system went live earlier on this morning, so the FPS is well and truly under way. This is a tremendous achievement on behalf of the team.”

People who want to block communications from a particular charity will be able to log on to the website or call the telephone number, then choose a charity and the communication channels they wish to block.

The charity will then receive a notification from the regulator and will log on to its own portal on the website to get the person’s information.

Williams said that 641 charities already had portals on the system and more would be joining shortly.

She said the regulator would carry out a formal review of the system in 12 to 18 months’ time.

“We’ve designed the FPS to be flexible,” she said. “If necessary we can increase its capacity, but we hope the wider efforts to improve fundraising standards and the impact of the General Data Protection Regulation will mean there’s much less demand for services over time.”

Stephen Dunmore, chief executive of the Fundraising Regulator, said the FPS set-up and running costs for its first year were likely to be significantly lower than predicted a year ago.

In August last year, the regulator predicted those costs would be £750,000, including £250,000 for set-up.

But Dunmore said today that the set-up costs had been £250,000 and the predicted first-year running costs would be £450,000. He said he expected the actual figure to be lower than that because the regulator was encouraging FPS users to use the website rather than the telephone line, which is more expensive to provide.

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Name and shame non-payers of fundraising levy, Sir Stuart Etherington urges

The chief executive of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations says the Fundraising Regulator should make charities that have not yet paid the levy explain themselves

Sir Stuart Etherington, chief executive of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, has called on the Fundraising Regulator to make public the names of charities that fail to pay its levy.

Speaking at a reception in London this morning to mark the launch of the Fundraising Preference Service and the first anniversary of the Fundraising Regulator, Etherington said charities that did not pay the levy should be made to explain themselves.

All charities that spend more than £100,000 a year on fundraising have been asked to pay the levy to fund the regulator, totalling almost 2,000 charities.

Stephen Dunmore, chief executive of the regulator, said today that 370 charities had either refused outright to pay the levy or simply not responded to “four or five” letters requesting payment.

The levy is voluntary, but Etherington said that ensuring the regulator was properly funded was crucial to sustaining self regulation – which, in turn, he said, was vital to maintaining the independence of the voluntary sector.

He said he was aware that the regulator’s board had decided to publish the names of those charities that had paid the levy.

“That is a very honourable way of approaching things, but my advice is to publish the names of those that have not paid the levy,” he said. “Name and shame. Put it out there and let them explain why they do not support the notion of self-regulation.”

Martyn Lewis, former chair of the NCVO and current chair of the Commission on the Donor Experience, agreed with him, saying it was a terrific idea.

Etherington led the review of fundraising in 2015 that led to the establishment of the regulator and the Fundraising Preference Service, which will allow people to block communications by phone, text, email or post from specific charities.

In his review, Etherington called for the FPS to be a “big red button” that people could activate to stop all communications from all charities altogether.

But he said he believed the more “subtle” form the FPS had taken was outstanding and better than his initial suggestion.

During the same event, Suzanne McCarthy, chair of the Fundraising Regulator’s standards committee, said the regulator would be conducting a “root-and-branch review” of the Code of Fundraising Practice in 2018.

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Responsibility for the code passed from the Institute of Fundraising to the regulator when it was established last year.

Although the regulator has proposed changes to the code and consulted on them, it has previously said it did not believe the time was right for a complete overhaul.

McCarthy said the regulator wanted to make the code “user-friendly, comprehensible and easy to work” to ensure that it was accessible to small charities.

The regulator has also today published a review of its first year of operation, which says that it received 713 complaints over the course of the year.

The review says it has 30 investigations under way or completed, has closed 621 cases and published its first adjudication, on the agency Neet Feet, in November.

The review says the regulator had an income to the end of March of £1,545,000, about £886,000 of which had come from levy contributions and £639,000 from start-up contributions made by the largest fundraising charities.

The regulator spent £1.3m over the same period, including £247,000 on the set-up of the FPS, it said.

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Diversity is the sector’s Achilles’ heel, says fundraising consultant

Carol Akiwumi tells the Institute of Fundraising’s annual convention that charities must stop doing the same old, same old with the usual suspects

The lack of diversity in the charity sector is “an embarrassment” and an “Achilles’ heel”, according to the fundraising trainer and consultant Carol Akiwumi.

Speaking at the Institute of Fundraising’s annual convention yesterday, Akiwumi said increasing diversity would help the sector face the challenges of the future with the help of different perspectives.

She was speaking at a panel session exploring what the “next big thing” in fundraising and the sector as a whole was likely to be.

“My idea for the next big thing is diversity,” she said. “At the moment it’s an embarrassment, an Achilles’ heel.

“The world is changing and the sector must keep up. That means getting past doing the same old, same old with the usual suspects.”

If charities really wanted to find new ways of doing things in order to raise funds and achieve their objects they would have to increase diversity, said Akiwumi.

“There are all those people who have such amazing ideas and who could help us by giving us alternative views,” she said.

“Because if the people who are closest to you are all like you, you have blind spots. All of us have unconscious biases – that’s why we need a 360-degree view.”

She challenged delegates to “get out of your comfort zone” and implement effective diversity strategies in order to find ways of “getting comfortable” with new and different perspectives and ideas.

“Dare to dream bigger,” Akiwumi said. “Dare to imagine that you can harness not just the ideas from the places that you would be uncomfortable with, but whole communities. We can actually begin to reach communities that we don’t traditionally target in our campaigns.”

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Sector critical of Lord Grade’s ‘laggards’ comment on fundraising

The chair of the Fundraising Regulator said in a Telegraph article that ‘too many charities are proving to be laggards’ and misinformed the Today programme about the preference service

Lord Grade, chair of the Fundraising Regulator, has been criticised by charity sector umbrella bodies after he said too many charities were “proving to be laggards” and mistakenly said the Fundraising Preference Service would enable people to opt out of receiving communications from all charities.

Grade wrote an article for The Daily Telegraph newspaper today in which he said that the regulator had seen many charities make “a real effort to review their practices, leading to innovative and creative approaches that put the donor first”.

But he said there was still a long way to go. “Too many charities are proving to be laggards,” he wrote. “But they will have to follow suit, whether they like it or not, due to another regulation which comes into force next year,” said Grade, meaning the General Data Protection Regulation.

Grade also appeared on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 this morning, where he mistakenly said people would be able to use the FPS to prevent communication from all charities or hear only from “charities that you favour”.

Information on the Fundraising Regulator’s website about the FPS, which will prevent direct marketing communications from charities by email, post, text message or telephone, says people will be able to identify up to three charities that they do not wish to hear from per online request. If people want to identify further charities, they must submit new requests.

Peter Lewis, chief executive of the Institute of Fundraising, said he was “deeply frustrated and saddened” to hear Grade talking again about fundraisers in a negative way and “misrepresenting how the overwhelming majority of charities communicate with and value their supporters”.

Lewis said: “We know that our members’ relationships with donors is paramount, which is why over the past year charities have supported the set-up of the regulator and helped to shape the FPS.”

He said the IoF supported a strong regulatory system, but in order for it to succeed it was vital that “clarity prevails over confusion”.

He said: “Only then can the regulator fully command the trust of both charities and the public.

“Ahead of Thursday’s launch of the FPS it is essential that the public hear the right information about the service so that the level of public trust and confidence that Lord Grade wants to see can be achieved.”

Vicky Browning, chief executive of the charity leaders body Acevo, said Grade’s remarks were “not helpful”.

She said: “For Lord Grade to brand charities ‘laggards’ in public only serves to undo the hard work of both his organisation and the sector in restoring public trust and confidence.”

Other people in the sector used Twitter to respond to Grade’s comments.

The Daily Telegraph used the article as the basis for its top story today, which says charities could be fined up to £25,000 if they “pester donors for cash”.

The figure is not mentioned by Grade, who said in his Today programme interview that any fines were a matter for the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Grade’s Telegraph article was written before the regulator is due to launch the FPS on Thursday, which coincides with the body’s first anniversary.

A spokesman for the Fundraising Regulator said it would be issuing clarifications to the media on some of the statements made by Grade. 

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Fundraising code amended as launch of preference service looms

The Fundraising Preference Service will be launched next week, and the Fundraising Regulator has adjusted the Code of Fundraising Practice to take this into account

The Fundraising Regulator has added new rules to the Code of Fundraising Practice to take into account the Fundraising Preference Service, which is due to launch next week.

The FPS, which will be launched officially on 6 July, will allow members of the public to block all contact from specific charities.

The new elements of the code, which come into effect from today, enforce the requirement that any charity receiving a notice from someone through the FPS will have to stop all contact with them within 28 days.

Charities will also be required to stop contact within 28 days if they receive any other kind of indication that the person does not wish to receive communications, the rules say.

The rules also call for charities to ensure that all third-party agencies inform them about and comply with any stop notice they receive.

Suzanne McCarthy, chair of the Fundraising Regulator’s standards committee, said: “It is important that members of the public have confidence that charities will respect their communication preferences.

“The changes made to the code today support the introduction of the new FPS and require all charities to stop sending direct marketing communications on receipt of a request made through the service.”

Stephen Dunmore, chief executive of the Fundraising Regulator, said the watchdog had written to the charities that do the most fundraising to ensure they were ready to receive FPS requests.

“While only these largest charities need to register at this stage, all charities need to make sure they know what the FPS is and are ready in the event that they receive a ‘stop’ notification,” he said.

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Digital round-up: Manchester bees tattoo appeal exceeds its fundraising target

Plus: Date for #GivingTuesday 2017 announced, OLIO adds donation feature to food-sharing app and the UNHCR launches #TheExtraMile

The Manchester Tattoo Appeal, set up in response to the Manchester Arena bombing last month, has exceeded its £500,000 target, making its JustGiving page the fifth-largest crowdfunding page on the site. Tattoo parlours across the UK pledged their time and resources to tattoo as many Manchester bees as possible as symbols of support, with those being tattooed (an estimated 10,000) donating money to the appeal to help victims of the terror attack. More than £4.7m has now been raised from various JustGiving fundraising campaigns set up in the wake of the bombing, including the Red Cross’s We Love Manchester Emergency Fund page, which has raised £1.6m alone.

#GivingTuesday is to return for a fourth year in 2017, with the date confirmed as 28 November. Speaking at the launch of the event this week, Sir John Low, the chief executive of the Charities Aid Foundation, which oversees and coordinates the day, said #GivingTuesday had become “one of the biggest days of charitable giving in the UK” and was a day for “doing good stuff”. He said that research commissioned by CAF after last year’s day found that 6.4 million people said they had heard of #GivingTuesday and 4.5 million had taken part. More than one in three people who were aware of #GivingTuesday said they would do something for charity in future as a result of the event.

The local food-sharing app OLIO has launched a new donations feature to incentivise its users to share more of their surplus food as well as raise money for causes. OLIO is a free app that connects people with local shops and cafés so that surplus food can be shared and not just thrown away. Users share photographs of their items on OLIO for others to collect. The new donation feature mean users can add food and other household items to the app and request donations to charities of their choice, with OLIO charity partners Feedback and FareShare the initial beneficiaries. OLIO co-founder Saasha Celestial-One said: “By teaming up with Feedback and FareShare, we are now making it even more meaningful for our users to share their spare food and work to tackle the problem of food waste at scale.”

The UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, launched a new fundraising event to coincide with World Refugee Day this week. #TheExtraMile is a virtual marathon challenge, with participants invited to cover 27 miles over a month, logging their distances through the UNHCR’s fundraising platform partner, GivePenny. It hopes to raise £50,000, which it says will be “enough to give more than 300 refugee families a home away from home”.

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