How do you ensure that your charity’s approach to fundraising fully reflects the needs of the vulnerable, including your own charity beneficiaries? Emma Malcolm sets out how Rethink Mental Illness reviewed its entire approach to fundraising and supporter care.

Few fundraisers could make it through the past eighteen months without being aware of the importance of considering potential vulnerabilities when fundraising, and ensuring that your charity never puts pressure on anyone to give.

Recent changes to the Charities Act and the findings of the Etherington Review, and the Institute of Fundraising’s new guidance on Treating Donors Fairly all reinforce this message. But the challenge is how to put in place a fundraising programme that provides adequate protection for anyone who may be vulnerable, particularly when many of your supporters are also your beneficiaries; those that the charity sets out to protect.

Vulnerability isn’t static

Inevitably, every charity’s approach to fundraising and their supporters will be different. But for us, as a mental health charity, it was critical that any fundraising policy we introduced would of course reflect the needs of vulnerable people. Having read the Etherington review, we promptly set out to write a vulnerable people policy for fundraising. But, we quickly recognised that vulnerability isn’t static. Anyone can be vulnerable at any given time and we wanted to reflect that in our approach.

Instead, we ended up reviewing the whole fundraising and supporter care programme to bring it into alignment with the charity’s approach to beneficiaries. After all, many of our supporters are service users, those with mental health issues, their carers, friends and relatives.

Essentially, we wanted to go above and beyond. We wanted to make sure that our supporters and service users were front and centre of everything that we do and that they will always be looked after and treated respectfully.

This meant making some pretty big changes, which - not least of all - included deciding to go ‘opt in’ for our fundraising communications. We also put in place a policy that any opt in permission would only be eligible for two years, ensuring that we review those permissions regularly.

Ultimately, this means that we can only market to people if they are happy to hear from us, so this shifts the focus onto more engaged supporters and, at the end of the day, we are happy with the concept that we may be working with a smaller, but more committed donor pool.

Getting started: consulting our stakeholders

Within the fundraising team, we were clear what approach we felt was right, but we knew we couldn’t do it alone. We consulted with beneficiaries, supporters, staff and trustees about their views and to ensure that they were engaged and understood our approach from the start.

At the outset, we set up a project group that brought together fundraising, service delivery, the database team and various other parts of the organisation, identifying what needed to be done to make all our fundraising communications opt in - and everyone’s role within that. This meant that everyone was engaged with the process from the beginning and knew what we were working towards.

This meant having some difficult conversations. We had to talk to our trustees and others within the organisation about anticipating less income from individual giving over the short term. While the concept was more than a bit scary, we knew we had to do what was right. And our trustees really got behind us on the programme – they wanted this too.

Front of house and behind the scenes

We have to consider that all our donors might be considered vulnerable at some point or another. With this in mind, we reviewed our whole fundraising programme, both in terms of the way we communicate with our supporters and what goes on behind the scenes.

We realised early on that we would need to make some major changes to our database and on an ongoing basis, we monitor language and have trained staff so they can spot any unusual donations and can query it.

Knowing that raffles and lotteries can be a real trigger for people who may have had gambling addictions or money troubles, we considered how we could protect people from those influences. We also introduced a way for people to tell us to exclude people they care for from lottery contact.  

We also did a lot of work mapping supporter journeys, refreshing our welcome pack and developing a clear calendar for all our communication. The fundraising department funded training for staff across the charity to help them understand more about dealing with vulnerable people.

There was much that we needed to do and, although at times the project seemed immense, we managed to make these changes relatively quickly. Having started our discussions on the move in early 2016, we went ‘opt in’ in June.

Talking to our supporters

It was really important that we communicated this approach to our beneficiaries and supporters, and we wanted to be fully transparent with them. What’s more, we are really proud of our approach and the steps we have taken.

We developed a Supporter Promise setting out our values and what our supporters can expect of us; what we will and won’t do when it comes to fundraising. We contacted our supporters to share this promise with them and our commitment to only contact supporters with their express permission. And we had a great response from the public to our launch.

Our top tips

• Be brave! Rethink Mental Illness looks after people who are really vulnerable and it’s only right and proper that we do the same for our supporters. We have made some really big changes to our fundraising approach and that might mean bringing in less money in the first instance, but if the longer-term picture means stronger supporter relationships and deeper engagement, then this can only be a good thing.

• Get everyone on board at the start and make sure you involve your database team. The amount of work they will have to do is immense. So, the sooner they are involved, the better.

• Seek advice from trade bodies, peers and fellow charities. (Check out the Institute of Fundraising’s new guidance on Treating Donors Fairly and the DMA’s Vulnerable Guidelines.

• Plan, plan, plan. Set out what you want to achieve, why and when and engage the whole organisation in making it happen.

Emma Malcolm is associate director for fundraising and supporter engagement at Rethink Mental Illness.