A 92-year-old poppy seller who took her own life felt “distressed and overwhelmed” by the huge number of requests for donations she received from charities, a report has concluded.

Olive Cooke, who died in the Avon gorge in Bristol, may have received almost 3,000 mailings from charities in a year, the report from the Fundraising Standards Board (pdf) says.

About a quarter of the charities that had Cooke’s details on file passed them on to other organisations, according to the FRSB, the independent self-regulator for charity fundraising in the UK.

After the death of Cooke, who was believed to be the longest-serving and most prolific poppy seller, family and friends said she had been upset by charities constantly asking her for money, prompting widespread concern over how fundraisers operate.

At her inquest it also emerged that she had been suffering from depression but no mention was made of the impact on her of the charities who contacted her.

The FRSB report said: “Mrs Cooke’s family have indicated that the cumulative impact of the number of organisations mailing her led to her feeling distressed and overwhelmed.”

A statement from the family in the report reads: “We want Olive to be remembered for her incredibly kind, generous and charitable nature. Far from being a victim, she was a strong believer in the importance of charities in UK society and local communities.

“At the same time she was concerned about the amount of letters and contact she was receiving from charities and we are sure she would have been very upset to know her details were being shared or sold by some charities she had agreed to support.”

Andrew Hind, chair of the FRSB, said: “While Mrs Cooke’s family believe that charities were not responsible for her death, they have confirmed that she was upset by the large number of fundraising approaches she received, particularly through the post.

“Her experience is a sad but extremely important case as it sheds light on the way in which fundraising activity could escalate and leave a committed donor feeling under pressure to give.

“Mrs Cooke’s experience demonstrates the inevitable consequences of a fundraising regime where charities have been willing to exchange or sell the personal details of donors to each other, and to commercial third parties. This created a situation where a donor to a number of charities could find themselves, after a period of time, receiving mail packs and phone calls from an ever-growing, and almost uncontrollable, number of charities.

“It must be acknowledged that individual charities had no way of knowing the cumulative impact of their practices or how many other organisations might be approaching Mrs Cooke at any one time.

“However, one might question whether more consideration could have been given by charities to the potential consequences of sharing her details so extensively and indeed how charities can prevent this from happening in the future.”

Hind said Cooke’s experiences were echoed by hundreds of complaints that the FRSB received after the publicity surrounding her death. He added: “While most individual charities did not send out excessive quantities of mail, the collective impact of mass market mailings and data sharing, with inadequate opportunities for the recipient to opt out, has meant that many other donors reported being inundated with requests from charities and feeling under pressure to give.”

As part of its investigation, the FRSB asked approximately 1,500 charities about dealings with Cooke. From 2000-2014 the number of charities that regularly asked her for donations more than trebled and, at its peak, she received over 460 mailings per annum from the charities in the sample.

But the report pointed out that an interview Cooke gave to the Bristol Post six months before she died suggested that the number of mailings analysed in the sample represented only about a sixth of the total number of fundraising requests she was actually receiving. That would put the number of requests at up to 2,796.

Of the charities sampled:

99 possessed Cooke’s details.

She had donated to at least 88 of these charities in her lifetime.

She had been a regular donor to 48 of these charities.

24 out of the 99 charities with her details on file had passed them on to others.

21 of these confirmed they had permission to share her details but in virtually all cases this permission was “assumed” and based on the fact that Cooke had not proactively opted out of data sharing.

While most charities had not themselves shared Cooke’s personal data with others, 70 of the 99 charities had obtained her personal details from a third party (such as a fellow charity or commercial list supplier).

In an interim FSRB report after Cooke’s death, 17 recommendations for changes to the code of fundraising practice were made, designed to give the public more control over the way charities communicated with them.

In its new report, which looked in more detail at the specifics around Cooke, the FRSB called for a “behavioural shift” in the way charities viewed their supporters.

Hind said: “There must also be a genuine commitment amongst all fundraising practitioners as well as charity chief executives and trustees to show greater respect to the public, and to ensure that every fundraising experience is a positive one.

“The relationship between a charity and its donors has to be cherished and donors must be placed firmly at the heart of fundraising in the future.”

• In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. Hotlines in other countries can be found here