Seasonal Fundraising

We are heading into one of the busiest times of the fundraising year and the start of the seasonal fundraising ask.  We heard from Gerald Oppenheim, CEO of the Fundraising Regulator (FR), last week that November is the month when the FR tends to receive the most complaints about fundraising activity.

There are detailed rules about different areas of fundraising, but it may be helpful to remember some simple principles:

• Set a clear framework for your fundraising – plan effectively to ensure that your agreed strategy/plan reflects your charity’s values, the resources/costs involved, and identifies key financial and reputational risks and sets out how you will mitigate those risks.
• Supervise your fundraisers – ensure you have effective systems in place to ensure that in-house fundraising staff and your volunteers know their role and requirements/boundaries and who to report any concerns or problems to. 
• Commercial partners – make sure your agreements with commercial partners are fully compliant with the relevant legal requirements and are in the charity’s best interests, for example, by: carrying out appropriate due diligence, communicating effectively your fundraising values and expectations, ensuring costs are justifiable and can be explained, and that proper control is kept of money raised.
• Think about your charity’s reputation – identify, assess and manage risk.  This may include, for example, considering the likely donor, supporter and public perception when income expectations and other goals are considered, ensuring your values are clearly communicated to people who work on your fundraising, satisfying yourself that legal rules and recognised standards which apply to fundraising are being followed, effective financial controls are in place, ensuring issues are reported back to the trustees and serious incidents are reported to the police and/or Charity Commission.
• Follow the law – make sure you are familiar with the Code of Fundraising Practice and refer to guidance issued by the Charity Commission.
• Make sure you are open and accountable including having an accessible complaints procedure and clearly communicate fundraising aims and achievements to the public, donors and supporters.
• If the charity’s fundraising has been the subject of complaints, either via your charity’s complaints policy or complaints to the Fundraising Regulator, have you reflected on the experience and analysed how to improve?  Do your policies and procedures reflect this and have any changes been effectively communicated to staff and fundraisers?
• Finally, charities should always make it clear in fundraising literature that any funds raised which cannot be applied to the appeal’s aims will be applied to the charity’s general purposes – this makes it much more straightforward to deal with any unused funds.