The Charity Sector â A Chance to Do Good and Take It Easy?

If you’re a marketer, perhaps you could use your skills to help a charity restore its fundraising efforts in difficult times? You’ll have seen the various news items about the crisis in charity fundraising, you may have read the exposes in the Daily Mail (although in that case, you may want to keep quiet about your favourite news source if you do move into the third sector). If so you’ve probably gathered the broad-brush changes –

an end to a sense of there being a ‘charity exception’ when it comes to the treatment of personal data and marketing permissions

fundraising regulation being shaken up

That’s about right, isn’t it? So, imagining you’re in your new job, where do you start?

Google would suggest that the Fundraising Standards Board (www.frsb.org.uk/ ) would be a good place to start, but no, as an ‘old’ self-regulating body they’re in the process of closing down. So that’ll be the same with the Professional Fundraising Association (PFRA www.pfra.org.uk/ ), then? No, they’re still going and regulating face-to-face fundraising - and merging with the Institute of Fundraising (IoF http://www.institute-of-fundraising.org.uk/ ). You can join the IoF and they have the Code of Fundraising Practice. The Code can be found here www.institute-of-fundraising.org.uk/code-of-fundraising-practice/ and its section on the Selling, Renting & Sharing of Marketing Lists has recently been updated. But that will be changing, again, now that a new regulator, the admirably self-explanatorily named Fundraising Regulator (www.fundraisingregulator.org.uk/) has been established. Another thing the Fundraising Regulator is helping with is delivering the Fundraising Preference Serice, to be launched in 2017. The details are still being worked through, but - in the wake of the problems caused by charity fundraisers’ conscious or inadvertent ignoring of generic data protection and marketing contact regulations - the solution will be the creation of a charity sector-specific ‘opt out’ mechanism. You’ll still need to be mindful of the role and requirements of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), TPS, MPS, etc, just like in the old job.

I know, I know.

Confused? I think you will be (oh, and if you do start your new role you may find that you will face nervous grillings from your charity’s trustees, who the Charity Commission has recently reminded of their “ultimate responsibility for fundraising” (www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/527790/CC20.pdf).

So, what to do? Well, you should always follow your heart – even if you can probably forget about enjoying an easier life in return. If you are bringing your marketing skills to the third sector (and you can’t park that ambition for 12 months in order to see what happens):

1. Best get in touch with the IoF

2. Be sure you’re up to date with the work the DMA is leading on making sense of fundraising and be sure to have a look at their second white paper about responsible fundraising, being launched on Tuesday 19th July http://dma.org.uk/event/securing-the-future-of-one-to-one-fundraising

3. Maybe have a word with these chaps www.raiseconsulting.co.uk if you’re not confident that your predecessors have really got a grip on what they need to be doing to ensure fundraising quality and compliance

*“If you are giving back, you took too much.” – Ricardo Semler