Making a call on the ICO

Howard Lake | 19 September 2013 | Blogs

• Tagged with:
• Individual giving
• Law / policy
• Telephone fundraising

Let’s face it, on a scale of irritation from ‘mild’ to ‘significant’, unsolicited cold calls, cold SMS texts and cold anything else can be as bad as it gets.

I’m talking about computerised voices telling us about PPI (payment protection insurance) payments or personal injury claims, or calls from numbers we don’t recognise that go dead when the software clicks into another target. So ubiquitous have these missives become that most of us find ourselves fielding them wearily on a weekly or even daily basis.

It’s for that reason that the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) last week made a case for more stringent penalties for those behind nuisance calls, calling for MPs to reduce the ‘level of harm’ it needs to prove in order to penalise perpetrators. As Simon Entwisle, Director of Operations at the ICO said: ‘It’s for MPs to decide where the balance lies, but I think it’s fair to say that most people probably don’t think the law’s getting it right at the moment.’

It’s all good stuff, but could a move towards tougher regulation also have a knock-on effect for phonecalls made on behalf of charitable organisations? Could it, for example, also impact telephone fundraising or supporter welcome calls?

If so, I think it would be a terrible shame – because I don’t believe professional fundraisers that follow the right processes while championing important causes, and high volume automated callers that don’t, are the same thing. Not at all.

Happily, a move towards tackling the worst excesses of nuisance calling could have positive implications for reputable fundraisers, since weeding out instances of bad practice can only underline the courtesy and professionalism with which fundraising calls are – or should be – made.

Let’s not pretend that every charitable call dialled is received with delight only, but the hoped-for outcomes of that contact are far removed from those of, say, a personal loans company, and that’s significant.

In truth fundraising by phone is already one of the most heavily regulated areas of fundraising out there thanks to Ofcom. Standards of compliance among agency and in-house fundraising teams are high, and rules governing the practice are taken very seriously indeed. And from Listen’s perspective the third sector is doing a good job of handling data with integrity and doing what’s right when it comes to communicating with supporters who have – if proper practice is being followed – already expressed direct interest in the cause in question.

That willingness to be contacted is key, and for charities and agencies alike it’s now all the more crucial that supporter databases are accurate and up to date regarding consent and preferred mode of contact, because that’s an area the ICO is determined to police – and rightly so.

So here’s the deal: we should be proud as an industry of the work we do. And we should also be quietly optimistic that a process of cleaning up telemarketing per se is one that better positions us to reach out to supporters, and prevents them from not feeling overrun already with myriad calls for myriad other things they never wanted in the first place.

For now, it’s fingers crossed-time. But when it’s all said and done, the ICO’s heady initiative might just serve to benefit charities and their phone-based fundraising efforts for a long time to come.

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.