Phew! The sigh of relief must have been palpable in the fundraising departments of some major charities when Olive Cooke’s family said that charities were not to blame for her death.
Cooke had supported the British Legion for 70 years and had also funded 27 direct debits to charities from her pension. The full inquest into her death will take place next month, but reports previously said she’d been overwhelmed by 180 letters a month and a regular deluge of phonecalls seeking more charitable cash.
I was reminded of Olive Cooke 10 days ago when visiting my frail, but razor-sharp, 86-year-old mum. She had just endured eight worrying days without a fully working phoneline. Spending hours contacting the BT call centres had left her exhausted.
So how pleased we were when the phone rang once again, just an hour after the repair had finally been completed. An old friend? The GP? No. It was a call centre soliciting further donations for arthritis research. My mum was clearly saddened. Were she to receive dozens of such calls, I’m certain it would be worse.
The Mail on Sunday went further this week. It secretly filmed inside a Listen Ltd call centre – reportedly funded by the RSPCA, Cancer Research, Shelter and Oxfam. Trainee cold callers were being tutored in how to extract cash from a 98-year-old pensioner or a mother of newly born twins just home from hospital.
People who had already given an Oxfam donation to street “chuggers” found their phone number passed to the call centre, which contacted them again within hours soliciting more. Individuals were being called in spite of sending opt-out texts to the company.
I’m certainly not one of those charity people who thinks that raising money is a regrettably vulgar activity that you only undertake with a peg over your nose. In my decade as chief executive of Stonewall, the London-based LGBT rights lobby group, turnover rose almost fourfold, with almost none of the increase from statutory sources.
I think fundraising is every bit as important as financial stewardship. And those speaking on behalf of fundraisers since Olive Cooke’s death have keenly pointed out that if you don’t raise cash, fewer people will have cancer treatments, aid packages, or hospice care.
But really effective fundraising is about personal relationships and a charity’s most senior staff should all be engaged in this. The intimacy of these relationships should be as nuanced with the thousands of individual givers contacted by phone, email or post, as with a handful of major donors.
You don’t need more regulation or legislation – both now being darkly threatened – to improve things, but you do need chief executive-level responsibility. How many charity bosses had actually visited the Listen Ltd call centre, as they should have, to hear the calls being made in their name? How many ensure they receive all their own organisation’s direct mail at their home address so they, and their families, get a sense of when regular communication gets closer to harassment, and whether it has emotional pull in the first place?
We already face a very real risk that a “contract culture” is hollowing out some of our oldest charities. In another 10 to 20 years, people may look back at the time when securing contracts became the principal key performance indicator for senior staff, while values and ethos quietly started being treated as historic quaintnesses.
It would be a tragedy if in parallel we end up treating donors with undisguised contempt too. They’re not patsies to be relieved of cash by salespeople flogging charitable giving, in the same way they might flog PPI schemes when the script on their screen changes.
Donors are critical partners in charitable enterprise. We need to treat them as such.
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