REVEALED: HOW RSPCA SNOOPS ON WILLS OF DONORS

As backlash over charity sharks grows, a disturbing new twist

THE RSPCA pays investigators to assess how much money donors might leave in their wills, the Mail can reveal today. The charity does not tell supporters their personal data is being used to give them a wealth rating – or that cash they have donated is funding the process.

The tactics were branded disgraceful by MPs and campaigners last night. They accused the RSPCA of treating its benefactors as commodities. The use of investigators emerged during a Daily Mail probe into how charities traded the personal data of Samuel Rae, an 87year-old dementia sufferer. The widower was found to be among a number of RSPCA donors subjected to ‘legacy prediction’.

Amid a major outcry over the Mail’s revelations:

The Information Commissioner said charities risked becoming a ‘dirty word’;

Esther Rantzen accused fundraisers of seeing supporters as ‘walking wallets’;

A former Save the Children executive accused charities of bonusdriven aggression;

Regulators promised an urgent investigation into the Mail’s latest evidence;

The RSPCA said it would fully review its use of personal data.

Yesterday the Mail revealed that the personal details of Mr Rae, a former Army colonel, were traded

up to 200 times by charities he trusted. The RSPCA first obtained his information when he took out pet insurance in 2005. Two years later it began sending his and other donors’ data to a firm specialising in legacy prediction.

The company’s job was to work out how much Mr Rae, from Cornwall, was worth and how much he might leave to the RSPCA. The charity passed on information about Mr Rae at least four times for prediction purposes.

The data was also used to establish a score estimating his wealth and donor potential. At no point is he thought to have been told this was going on, let alone asked for his consent.

Tory MP Nigel Evans, a former member of the Commons public administration committee that oversees charities, said the Mail’s revelations showed the extent of the trade in people’s generosity. ‘Because people have given once, they become a commodity to charities which they have seen fit to trade and use as they please,’ he added.

Another Tory MP, Peter Bone, described the RSPCA’s behaviour as staggering. He said: ‘If it was a commercial organisation doing this, they would be closed down for these kinds of practices. It is extraordinary, well done to the Mail for exposing it. This is something the Cabinet Office and the Charity Commission need to look into as a matter of urgency to see if regulation needs to be brought in.’

Pensions minister Baroness Altmann, who has spent much of her career campaigning on behalf of the elderly, said: ‘ The majority of charities uphold good standards. But clearly, there are some which are letting the sector down. It is really important the public is able to trust the charities they donate to.’

Mr Rae’s son Chris found out what data the RSPCA held on the pensioner by making a ‘subject access request’.

The answer revealed that in 2007: ‘Mr Rae’s details were shared with one of the RSPCA’s data processors for the purposes of profiling against a legacy predictor model.

‘Supporters were scored relating to the likelihood of leaving a legacy. These are scored on a scale of one to 20 with one being a high probability of giving. Mr Rae’s score was calculated as 13.’

The report says that in November 2010: ‘The RSPCA shared Mr Rae’s address details with our agent, Prospecting for Gold Ltd as part of a database screening exercise.’

The Prospecting for Gold website advertises itself as a service for charities that ‘can uncover hidden wealth among your supporters’. The RSPCA admitted it continued to contact Mr Rae to ask for donations, even after Mr Rae had asked it not to. It says this was a ‘genuine error’.

When asked about the way it had shared his data, the RSPCA said he ‘had not opted out of the relevant consent statement’. But copies of the forms Mr Rae completed reveal the opt- out boxes and consent statements were hidden in tiny print at the bottom of forms.

Last night a spokesman for the RSPCA insisted the charity had processed Mr Rae’s data lawfully – but said the charity had initiated a full review of the charity’s policies on the use of supporters’ data and data protection statements. He said the RSPCA’s use of legacy predic- tion was common practice for charities and helped ‘to understand the make-up of our supporter base’.

The spokesman said: ‘It simply provides a score and does not tell us whether anyone has actually left a legacy to the charity.’

The RSPCA refused to say how much donated money had been paid to the companies.

Last night, Alistair McLean, of the Fundraising Standards Board, said it would ‘fully investigate’ the charities exposed by the Mail.

Money left in wills is an increasingly important source of finance for charities. It pays for half the work of the RSPCA.