Charities ‘using pandemic as excuse to ignore opt-out requests’

‘As staff were furloughed and roles changed, handover of FPS compliance may not have been carried out’

CHARITIES are bombarding people with fundraising letters and emails even after they have been asked to stop, the Fundraising Regulator has said.

In a blog post, the body said that it was writing to organisations that were ignoring feedback and warned that they may be breaching fundraising regulations and data protection law.

The regulator made the intervention after a review of the Fundraising Preference Service (FPS), which allows users to opt out of communication from charities that are registered with the Charity Commissions in England and Wales or Northern Ireland.

The FPS was set up after the death of Olive Cooke in 2015. Friends of the 92-year-old from Bristol said she was “overwhelmed” by requests from charities for donations before she died.

At the time, the Fundraising Standards Board acknowledged that fundraising may have been “one of a number of factors that is said to have caused her some distress in recent months”.

Subodh Patel, FPS manager at the Fundraising Regulator, wrote: “We found a number of charities which are already set up on the FPS charity portal but are not acting on requests to stop direct marketing communications.”

He said that some organisations were not even logging in to the portal and could be breaching industry codes and data protection laws.

The regulator accepted that Covid may have caused some problems at charities but warned that it could no longer be used as an excuse.

Mr Patel said: “The reason many charities are not logging in to act on their requests is partially linked to the pandemic. Every day I speak to organisations, and I’ve found that as staff were furloughed and roles changed, handover of FPS compliance may not have been carried out appropriately.

“Now that much of this upheaval has ended, making sure you are accessing FPS requests when needed should be a priority.

“We are starting to write to the charities that we have found are no longer logging into the FPS charity portal to let them know that they need to act so they are FPS compliant.”

The regulator has previously named 12 charities that had not responded to opt-out requests, including the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter-day Saints, Sistah Space and Meningitis Help.

Charities are given 28 days to respond to an opt-out request before they are considered to be in breach of the fundraising code. If a charity ignores reminders to act on an FPS request, the regulator will name and shame them.