Crocodile tears over poppy seller Olive
FUNDRAISERS have been handed scripts to help them deal with difficult questions about the death of poppy seller Olive Cooke.
Call centre staff have been handed sheets of paper instructing them what to say if members of the public ask them about Britain’s longestserving poppy seller, who was overwhelmed by requests for money from charities in the months before she died earlier this year.
The death of the 92-year-old – who at one point had been receiving 267 charity letters in one month – has prompted a major investigation into how charities are fundraising.
In the months since nearly 400 complaints have been made about the behaviour of charities – many relating to cold-calling, and the ways in which charities target the elderly.
Fundraisers working for charities including the NSPCC, Macmillan Cancer Care, Oxfam and the British Red Cross have been handed a script in which they are told to say that they are ‘heartbroken to hear of Mrs Cooke’s death and that it was an ‘incredibly sad story’.
They are then told to say: ‘I can assure you in partnership with the charities that we work alongside we take great care and effort to protect anyone that we suspect may be vulnerable, and have firm training and policies to ensure this is always adhered to.’
The script was seen by an undercover reporter at a call centre which carries out campaigns for 40 major charities – including many of those that contacted Mrs Cooke before her death, such as Save the Children and the Battersea Dogs and Cats home.
Supervisors warned fundraisers about the ‘ horrendous press’ they were getting since Mrs Cooke’s death. ‘ We are so massively scrutinised at the moment, so we cannot afford to put a foot wrong,’ one said.
Mrs Cooke was found with multiple injuries after she fell into Avon Gorge. There were suggestions the hounding for money may have been linked to her death but her family have insisted the charities were not to blame.
But revelations about their level of intrusion, which Mrs Cooke had spoken about publicly, sparked a debate over aggressive fundraising practices.
The Fundraising Standards Board has since said it wants to make it easier to opt out of unwanted contact. In an interim report it said it received 384 complaints from May 15 to June 5. Four in ten were related to the frequency of contact by charities, while more than a third were about approaches being made to the elderly or the vulnerable.