Deja dead: why charities' appeals to the deceased will cost them dear
Howard Lake | 1 August 2007 | News
Mark Roy, Chief Executive of The REaD Group and founder of The Bereavement Register, asks why charities are still sending fundraising appeals to dead people despite the requests of their relatives to stop.
Question: What’s the difference between a lifetime donation of £15 a month and a brand damaged because of poor data management to just one person?
Answer: Over £9,000 and irresponsible targeting of direct mail¦
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¦ And one specific charity that will remain nameless knows this to its detriment, after it refused to take my deceased wife off its fundraising database.
Following Sarah’s death I diligently wrote to inform the majority of her suppliers including banks, insurers, favourite shops and charities, so they could close accounts and discontinue all future communication. Despite this however, seemingly every week Sarah would receive a letter asking her for a donation to a particular cause.
It was a charity that she had supported all her adult life and not a month went by that she didn’t give via her direct debit or through a one off feel good donation. Clearly their direct mail worked.
After she had died, however, it didn’t and couldn’t. It actually became very upsetting, serving as a regular reminder of our loss, prompting my tearful seven year old to ask one morning why the organisation was mailing Mummy when she wasn’t here any more.
This understandably spurred me into action. I phoned and wrote numerous times, initially respectfully and later point blank rudely to ask them to stop writing, but still the letters came.
As a direct result, my kids and I will never, ever give to the charity again. They have irrevocably damaged their brand, and when I see chuggers on the street representing the organisation or ads on TV it reminds me just how insensitive they were and strengthens my resolve not to donate, despite the good work they do.
Sadly I am just one of thousands that has been affected by inappropriately targeted direct mail. Eight years ago there was an excuse, but now there isn’t. In 2000 I set up The Bereavement Register, a tool which helps UK companies remove the names of the deceased from their mailing lists.
It is a database of people that have died, collected through the funeral profession, registrars and mass promotion of the service to the public. The deceased are verified through death certificates, so organisations can be certain that every single person on the Register is truly deceased, allaying the fear that a company is removing people that still could respond to their communications. It now holds a staggering 2.5 million names and is growing by an average of 30,000 every month.
Over 93% of all people registering a death receive details of The Bereavement Register through their Registrar and most NAFD funeral directors display the registration leaflets on their premises. With the recent development of TBR Daily, charities can ensure that registered deceased records are removed almost instantaneously. Whereas products using probate data can take over 8 months for the data to filter through. The implications of this are staggering!
Charities rely on the generosity of their supporters. Unfortunately, however, the number of British donors is falling. Twenty years ago four out of five people regularly supported a charity, but this has now shrunk to 58% which is very bad news for the third sector especially as the number of charities in the UK is growing. Last year alone 3,728 new charities were registered with the Charities Commission and all of them are looking for a slice of the donation pie.
In addition, according to the FT (23rd December 2006), even though household wealth has doubled over the last decade, donations to charities have struggled to keep pace with inflation.
And it gets worse – research by Charities Aid Foundation shows that typically 6% of donors contribute almost half of all money raised, meaning many charities are becoming increasingly dependent on a smaller group of donors that are growing older every year.
This begs the question – can charities afford to alienate potential supporters through inappropriately targeted direct mail?
I think not.
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.