UK-based telephone fundraising organisation, Relationship Marketing, is calling on the fundraising sector to appeal against a ‘miscarriage of justice’ that it claims led to charity fundraising calls being treated the same as commercial telesales.

Chief executive Hugh McCaw (pictured below) wants the government to revisit its decision – made in 1998 – not to give charities special status in the Telephone Preference Service (TPS).

The TPS is the national register of people who do not wish to be cold-called for telemarketing purposes. Since the TPS became the official ‘Do Not Call’ register in 1999, telephone fundraising calls have had the same status as commercial telemarketing calls. This means cold fundraising calls are prohibited to any member of the public registered with the TPS. (Market research calls, because they are not ‘sales’ calls, are exempt from the TPS.)

However, a white paper by Hugh McCaw looking at the 1999 legislation that led to the TPS, says the Government had originally envisaged a different system for telephone fundraising.

McCaw explains that a consultation on draft data protection regulations issued by the Department of Trade and Industry in 1998 recommended the opt-out system (people are deemed to accept cold calls unless they specifically opt-out of receiving them) now used by the TPS.

But he adds that the same consultation also suggested charities might not be part of this general opt-out system. It proposed having an ‘opt-back in’ system so that people could choose to opt-out of receiving commercial cold calls but could then opt back in to charity calls.

The Institute of Charity Fundraising Managers (as the Institute of Fundraising was then called) lobbied hard in support of this separate category for charities and even asked for a blanket exemption. But, McCaw points out, when the draft regulations appeared four months later, the DTI had abandoned the idea of an opt-back-in for charities altogether.

McCaw says: “With the ICFM supporting the separate category for charities, someone, or some organisation, must have made some pretty powerful counter-arguments that swung the DTI away from a separate category and towards treating telesales and fundraising exactly the same.

“I believe that whatever the DTI’s reasons for not giving charities a separate opt-back-in category represent a miscarriage of justice. I believe they were wrong not to have conceded this to the charities. The fundraising sector now needs to appeal against that decision. We must go back to the Government and Information Commissioner’s Office and ask once again for a separate category for charities in the Telephone Preference Service.

“At the very least, we need to begin a debate within the sector about cold calling. There are plenty of charities, particularly local charities such as hospices, that could benefit from cold acquisition, especially in the current economic climate. Yet the system cuts off this route to potential donors as around 60 per cent of households are TPS-registered.

“But as soon as anyone even suggests that cold calls should be reconsidered, there is a hue and cry from the consumer protection lobby and plenty of people within this sector, who seem to believe that even thinking about changing the rules is some kind of heresy.

“I believe we have shown there was every intention from the Government to treat fundraising differently to telesales. At the very least this should allow us to begin an informed debate.”

The white paper – Ringing the Changes – aims to show:

• Data protection and telecoms privacy legislation in the late 1990s was intended to regulate commercial telemarketing, not charity fundraising. Fundraising unfortunately got caught up in the regulatory net as an intended consequence of the legislation.
• Fundraising does not have the same intent as commercial telemarketing. Telemarketing is a sales call aiming to sell directly to the consumer; fundraising is not a sales call (there is no commercial transaction) but asks a donor or potential donor to support a cause and/or beneficiaries.
• There is already a precedent for treating one type of cold call differently because of the intent behind the call. Market research calls are exempt from the TPS because they are not sales calls.

Ringing the Changes – can be downloaded at www.relationshipmarketing.org.uk

 [Hugh McCaw]