FRSB proposal to limit comms shows we need a new theory of fundraising ethics
Howard Lake | 10 June 2015 | Blogs
This time next year there could be an upper limit on the number of times a charity may communicate with one of its donors. That’s one of the recommendations made by the Fundraising Standards Board in its interim report into whether Olive Cooke was ‘overwhelmed’ by the volume of fundraising communications she received.
It will now be up to the Institute of Fundraising to decide first whether it accepts this ridiculous recommendation – and since the IoF’s standards committee will now have an ‘independent’ chair, it must be likely that it will – and second, if it does accept it, how it will it be implemented.
Will this limit apply to all donors or just those below or above a certain value? Will it apply equally to patrons of a charity giving, say, £10,000 a year and donors on £2 a month recruited via a loss-leading DRTV ad? Will it just apply to solicitations, or will it also apply to thank you calls and emails? Will the automatic STOP code that goes with an SMS donation be count towards the limit?
The limit of course must be set at a level that would stop those donors likely to feel overwhelmed actually being overwhelmed.
One major gifts expert recommends thanking major donors 10 times. Sounds a lot. But by the time they get an informal note, a telephone follow-up, a formal letter from the fundraiser, a formal letter from the chief executive, a call from the chair of the board, an invitation to a recognition event…
All that could easily take the charity over its prescribed limit for the year.
And will the limit apply to a calendar year or the 12 months immediately after first contact – database people, get working on this now!
No doubt the consultation process around the implementation of this recommendation will sort everything out and it will run completely smoothly and deliver a workable outcome that satisfies everybody.
Why we need a new theory of fundraising ethics
But my point in this blog is not to rant about this one recommendation. It’s to ask how it even got to be made in the first place.
This proposed solution – imposing a restriction on the number of times a charity can contact someone – is not proportionate to the scale of the problem. I wrote last week on the Critical Fundraising blog that using Olive Cooke and people such as her as a benchmark for reforming fundraising practice would lead to extreme measures because Mrs Cooke was not a typical donor.
But the FRSB proposals are blanket recommendations that cover all donors, not just those who are likely to feel ‘overwhelmed’.
At the heart of the issue here is that the fundraising profession is attempting to modify its applied ethical codes without having much of an idea of the normative ethics that lie behind them.
The Code of Fundraising Practice and the Fundraising Promise tell fundraisers what they must and must not do, but they don’t tell them why the must or must not do those things.
Is it to protect public trust? Is it to improve and maintain donor relationship? Is it to provide meaningful philanthropy for donors? Is it to do these things because doing so results in higher lifetime value (LTV) of supporters or because it’s the right thing to do in and of itself?
We just don’t know. Whenever we encounter ethical grey areas of current practice (such as whether to knock on doors bearing a ‘no cold calling’ sticker) or totally new ethical dilemmas, we’re not sure how to respond. Because fundraising has no ethical theory to guide it, this sector literally makes up its professional ethics as it goes along, often in response to a politician, journalist, or someone else outside of the fundraising profession, shouting very loudly that we need to change.
For the past two months, my fundraising think tank Rogare has been working on developing a new theory that aims to put the beneficiary at the centre of fundraising ethics. Fundraisers owe a duty to their beneficiaries that is at least equal to – if not greater than – the duty they owe to their donors. That’s the duty to ensure that nonprofit organisation have sufficient income to provide services. This is what grounds fundraisers’ duty to ask for support.
In a nutshell, the core of the theory we are developing is:
Ethical fundraising balances the duty of fundraisers to ask for support, with the rights of other stakeholders not to be put under ‘undue’ pressure to donate.
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(‘Undue pressure’ is the term used it the FRSB’s Fundraising Promise.)
You can read our initial ideas and thinking in this post on Rogare’s Critical Fundraising blog.
The decisions we make now will affect fundraising for 10 years – they must be the right ones
I’m a supporter of the regulatory regime we have in place. That the body that investigates breaches of the rules (FRSB) is independent of the body that makes the rules (IoF) is a huge strength of the system. I also think most of the adjudications the FRSB has made have been considered and proportionate.
But the problem is that the FRSB’s ethics are focused on donor protection. It sees itself as a donor protection agency that needs to protect donors’ interests against excessive fundraising – something I wrote about in two UK Fundraising blogs way back in 2007 (here and here) shortly after the FSB (as it then was) was set up.
For example, the FRSB points out that it received 384 complaints specifically in response to its Olive Cooke investigation, 161 of which were about the frequency of approaches. The FRSB considers this is a significant indication of public disquiet about fundraising. Considering that these 161 complaints were not spontaneous but actually prompted by the investigation and the events surrounding it, and that upwards of 48,000 people complained about all types of fundraising in 2013 (about half of which were about DM and telephone combined), I’d be a little more cautious in interpreting what they actually indicate.
So what we have is a recommendation that the IoF should impose a restriction on the number of times a charity may communicate with any donor (not just those who are likely to feel ‘overwhelmed’), based on 161 complaints and the media and political furore ignited by Mrs Cooke’s death. That’s because it’s the role of the FRSB is to act on those complaints.
It seems quite likely to me that using the ethical theory we are proposing, the FRSB’s recommendation would not strike the appropriate balance between fundraisers’ duties to their donors and their beneficiaries.
The decisions the fundraising sector takes today will impact on charities’ abilities to raise the money they need to provide services for their beneficiaries for the next decade.
For that reason, the fundraising profession has an ethical duty to ensure that any reforms enacted in response to the objections of certain stakeholders are appropriately balanced with the long-term interests of the beneficiaries of voluntary organisations.
The fundraising profession needs to adopt a consistent foundational theory of normative ethics to inform its applied ethical decisions.
It cannot continue changing its professional ethics on the hoof every time someone outside the profession disagrees with it.
Ian MacQuillin is director of Rogare, the fundraising think tank at Plymouth University’s Centre for Sustainable Philanthropy.
Image: scissors cutting here and there by hchjjl on Shutterstock.com
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.