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FRSB must have more members
Submitted by pennystephens on 9 May, 2008 - 11:14.
The Fundraising Standards Board needs to attract "many more organisations" according to Minister for the Third Sector Phil Hope.
Speaking in response to the FRSB's first annual review, Hope said that he was confident it had the potential to succeed. "However, many more organisations will need to join in the coming year to convince us that the sector has the will to fully embrace self-regulation and make it work. The alternative, as set out in the Charities Act, would be statutory regulation," he said.
Figures show that FRSB members - currently just over 860 - dealt with 8434 complaints to the year ending in February 2008. Just four were referred to stage 2 of the FRSB's complaints procedure and one to stage 3.
Thirty one per cent of complaints concerned direct mail, 21 per cent data protection issues, 21 per cent telephone fundraising and 13 per cent face-to-face fundraising. Escalated complaints dealt with direct mail, telephone fundraising and legacy fundraising.
Chief executive of the FRSB Jon Scourse said it had never expected a huge number of complaints to get past the charities' own complaints procedures. "You don't judge the Fire Brigade on how many fires it attends," he said. "You judge it on its fire prevention and how efficiently it deals with fires when it's called out. This is a good analogy for the FRSB"
The Board will be launching a new drive for membership later in the year and still hopes to achieve its target of between 4,000 and 5,000 members to make it self-funding. Scourse said he thought there were still many charities who intended to join but "hadn't quite got around to it yet."
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Well, it is called the BBC Children in Need Appeal...
Maybe someone at the BBC assumed it was the "BBC _and_ Children in Need Appeal".
So, just five of the complaints made against fundraising charities last year could not be satisfactorily resolved at the level of the charity involved.
Given the millions of individual direct mail appeals, fundraising telephone calls, face to face encounters, fundraising events, magazine/newspaper inserts, TV, radio and email appeals etc made by thousands of charities last year, that suggests to me a fairly healthy state of affairs. Shouldn't we as a sector be celebrating that result?
If the FRSB does succeed in increasing its membership to 4,000 - 5,000 charities it should end up dealing with 23 to 29 such serious cases a year, assuming the growth in complaints is proportionate to number of members. Still, not too bad, and hardly indicative of a sector wildly out of control and in need of self-regulation and the continuing threat of state regulation if that fails.
When it comes to numbers and demonstrable cases of abuses of trust and charitable funds, like the BBC and Children in Need case cited above, don't we need some kind of regulator that oversees how companies misbehave in this regard? The Times reports that, with regard to "phone-ins for the majority of the BBC's fundraisers - which include programmes such as Children in Need", "it is understood that there were problems with over a dozen programmes".
Wouldn't that be a better focus for government concern, threats, and funding for regulation?
Perhaps the BBC will join?
"BBC secretly banked £106,000 of Children in Need phone-in cash"
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/media/ar...