Hasty legislation is no way to honour the memory of Olive Cooke
Howard Lake | 8 June 2015 | Blogs
The people who might suffer if government acts in haste are the people who need charities the most. And there’s a bigger issue not being talked about.
The sad death of Olive Cooke has sparked outrage in the press and accusations of greed and heavy-handedness by fundraisers. And understandably so; when one person gets two hundred and fifty letters a month and phone calls on top it’s no wonder people start asking questions.
But now, alas, we have some unhelpful interventions from MPs like John Spellar, who appears to put charities in the same bracket as organised crime, and from others like Andrew Percy calling for legal restrictions on ‘nuisance letters’. The government too is threatening new legislation.
Whoa! Slow down. Knee-jerk reactions in a fevered atmosphere are the last things anyone needs.
Yes, it was indeed suggested by someone close to Mrs Cooke that too many charity appeals contributed to her death. But her family – presumably those closest to her – have denied it, so she may not have literally been ‘hounded’ to death by fundraisers as some headline writers would have it.
That’s not to deny she found so many appeals a source of great distress. Nor is it to evade the fact that we’re under the spotlight and that we shouldn’t pause to reflect. The IOF Standards Committee is looking again at the Code of Fundraising Practice – a wise response to the situation – but I have to say that having sat on that committee myself for six years I’m not sure what it might do differently.
Take one critically important principle in the Code, namely that charities can use ‘reasonable persuasion’ with donors (it’s at paragraph 1.3.1.b by the way). It took a long time to choose those two words but we always knew they had one possible problem, which is the very ambiguity of the word ‘reasonable’. What I think is reasonable persuasion is to others just undue pressure. How do we as a profession legislate more specifically for that?
I’m not sure we can. Should we add requirements limiting the number of letters we can send to everyone or just to vulnerable pensioners? Similarly, should government prescribe the maximum number of times a telephone fundraiser can ask for a direct debit in one call?
Act in haste, repent at leisure.
It’s not the answer and for several reasons. How do we know a donor is a vulnerable pensioner? How do we know that if someone hasn’t replied twice to a letter that it’s because they feel undue pressure rather than them being away when appeals were delivered and that they won’t respond willingly to the next. There is way too much detail for simple solutions to work.
That’s not to say we do nothing. Maybe some more specific and sensitive practice on things like how many times to ask in one call will help us stay the right side of reasonable. But not arbitrary limits on how much fundraising we can do, imposed by politicians keen to be seen to act but less keen, perhaps, on the consequences. All that will do is squeeze, quite artificially, the flow of money that millions of people still give quite happily year after year. It’s obvious who will suffer the most as a result.
Greed can be good (sometimes)
Are fundraisers greedy just like their commercial cousins? If wanting to raise as much money as possible is greedy then yes. But here’s the difference; commerce makes money for its own sake and I don’t know any charity that does the same. But I do know of hundreds that are desperate for money because they’re faced with a tide of human need that shows no sign of receding.
Which brings me to the bigger issue. Until the need for charities to exist goes away, charities will need more money, and that need won’t go unless they raise more money. It’s a sort of viscous circle that can’t be broken by fundraisers alone. It needs programme staff, chief execs and trustees to reconsider the endless pressure for jam and more jam today and to take the brave decision to forgo some money this year to ensure generous donors still give enough in five and ten years’ time.
Don’t forget what this could mean – that people who rely on charities might suffer more today (or even die today) to help and save more people tomorrow. It sounds unpalatable but the alternative of politically expedient limits imposed from Whitehall will only hit more people today and tomorrow.
Surely not something Olive Cooke would have wanted as her legacy.
Photo: Downing Street and Whitehall signs (detail) by Olibac on Flickr.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.