Charities desperately need telephone donations. But is the way they secure them justified? As fundraising comes under scrutiny again, the people on the other end of the line tell their stories

Christopher Robinson worked at a charity fundraising call centre earlier this year, but he couldn’t take it for long. The work, he says, was demoralising. There was one man he called who said he’d been rung 10 times already that day. “People were getting really fed up with it, and I don’t blame them,” he says. He remembers one call, while trying to raise money for a cancer charity, to a woman who had just been diagnosed with breast cancer and told him she didn’t want to give any more money. He says his supervisor told him he should have pushed it, that she “might have been more prone to give”.

For all the criticism of the tactics used by the callers, and the irritation and guilt trip you will probably have experienced if you’ve ever been called by one begging for money, working at a call centre doesn’t sound much fun. It’s “brutal”, says one former worker; it’s “soul-destroying”, says another. When they talk about their experience, they offer an agonised account of the moral complexity of their profession.

For without those tactics, the charities that rely on them would be facing a funding shortfall. This week, that moral dilemma was brought to the fore yet again, after a Daily Mail reporter worked undercover at GoGen, one of the biggest charity call centres, which is based in east London. It emerged that on behalf of at least four charities – Oxfam, the NSPCC, Macmillan and British Red Cross – they had been ringing people registered with the Telephone Preference Service (which should stop them receiving cold calls), and were accused of calling vulnerable people, including those with dementia.

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And it’s not the first such example. Charities’ fundraising practices have attracted a lot of attention since the death of Olive Cooke, a 92-year-old poppy seller, in May, with media reports linking her suicide to hundreds of letters and phone calls from charities asking for money, which had left her “exhausted”. But the criticism has been building for much longer. Last year, a Dispatches documentary for Channel 4 went undercover at two call centres, Pell & Bales, which is one of the biggest in the market, and NTT in Bristol, and found staff were encouraged to lie to donors – about having children, for instance, to “help the rapport-building” – and that some people, including one woman with a terminally ill child and another who suffered from depression, were not taken off the call list.

Not everyone has been surprised by the claims. “No one needed to go undercover to see what had been going on,” says Charlie Hulme, managing director of DonorVoice, which advises charities on how to retain supporters. Charities, he says, could have just gone to the call centres to listen to calls (indeed, some do this). The companies “were doing what they had been asked to do, which is to get as much money out of people as possible. Charities go to call centres and say ‘we want to get x thousand direct debits’. But clearly they want to keep their costs down as much as possible. The results are inevitable if the pressure is high and the costs are low, what did they think was going to happen?”

“From what I’ve seen in documentaries, the practices haven’t changed,” says Chris Willsher, who worked for a fundraising call centre for four months a few years ago. A musician, he says many other musicians and actors were targeted for the work, told they would be able to fit casual shifts in around auditions, and that their creativity was valued. But then, he says, “you’re not allowed to go off script. You have a script on screen on front of you and you click your way through it ... You leave each call really exhausted because you’ve put so much effort in to depressing the person on the other end of the phone as much as you possibly can, just to get some money out of them.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A taskforce has been formed to investigate telephone fundraising. Chair, Alan Gosschalk of Scope, says: ‘There have been some series issues raised.’ Illustration by David Sparshott

He says each caller’s computer system monitors them, “so as soon as you hang up there is a timer on your screen and it starts counting the amount of time that you’re not making calls. If you want to go to the loo, or grab some water, you’re being monitored and it can go against you in how many shifts you’ll be offered in the future. They expect you to be on the phone constantly.”

Amara, who now runs her own business, remembers a male campaign manager standing outside the women’s loos to monitor how long she would be (she says three minutes was considered the acceptable limit). And on the other end of the phone, she would regularly have to put up with abuse. “I do understand people’s frustration, but some of them would say really obscene things, like if I was calling for a charity that raises money for people with cancer, I’d be told: ‘I really wish you’d get cancer.’” She would have to continue the phone call as long as possible and still try to get a donation.

She worked for an agency for three years, first as a fundraiser on the phones, then as a trainer who would monitor the new recruits. “You have to make the three asks,” she says. Everyone talks about the three asks – the number of times each fundraiser has to ask a donor for money per call. “You can hear these people on the phone saying, ‘Don’t ask me again’. And then you have to teach [the fundraisers] a way that they can put the three asks in.” She says calls were monitored randomly by supervisors, and fundraisers were pulled up on it if “they didn’t make a strong third ask”.

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There were answers for every “excuse” for why people didn’t want to give more money, whether they were unemployed, on a small pension or seriously ill. “It’s sad because you become desensitised,” she says. “You’re not listening to the fact that this person is hurt, you’re listening to the fact that they’ve had a direct experience [of a disease related to a charity] and they’re going to give me money, and if they don’t give me money, I’m going to get fired. It’s only when you leave at the end of the day with such negative energy that you feel what you’ve done is ethically wrong.”

After Olive Cooke’s death, the Fundraising Standards Board (FSB) launched an inquiry into fundraising practices (her family said charities were not to blame for her death, and that she had been suffering from depression; a full inquest is still to be held). “There have been some serious issues raised and as charities, we are taking that very seriously, and it’s really important that we get things right,” says Alan Gosschalk, director of fundraising for Scope, who is chairing a task group on telephone fundraising. “We definitely don’t want people to feel pressure, we want people to feel inspired to give.” According to the FSB’s most recent complaints report, released this week, in 2014 most complaints about fundraising methods were about direct mail and telephone calls (more than 8,000 people complained about being called at home, and about the tone of the calls).

Scope, like most big charities, use call centres. “It’s a way to fundraise that is more efficient than employing lots of people within the charity. The last thing we want to do is upset people, so we’re taking what has emerged very seriously.” But he adds that phone contact with supporters, and potential supporters, is still a valuable way of engaging with people.

“Charities have been using call centres to call people for 25 to 30 years, and there is nothing inherently wrong or unethical in using them,” says Ian MacQuillin, director of Rogare, a fundraising thinktank at Plymouth University. “Ethical fundraising has to balance the duty of charities to ask for money to provide resources for their beneficiaries with duties to other stakeholders, including donors. At the moment, we’re seeing a kneejerk rush to shift that balance in favour of protecting the donor, and if you restrict fundraisers’ abilities to ask, you’ll end up damaging the people who everyone wants to serve.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Olive Cooke, Britain’s oldest poppy seller, was found at the bottom of Avon Gorge, near Bristol, in May. Photograph: SWNS.com

But isn’t it counterproductive to call people, asking for money, annoying them? “Are the people you’re annoying those who are likely to give to you anyway,” he replies. “If you don’t ask, people don’t give you money. It’s a bit of a myth that people give to charities when they choose to. The whole reason there is a fundraising profession is that people give when they’re asked to do so.”

MacQuillin doesn’t think fundraising is becoming more aggressive, but acknowledges competition is fierce and acquisition of new donors is getting harder. One of the popular models to attract new supporters is to run a big campaign asking for £2 a month, but he says that is a loss leader. “You don’t make money out of a TV advert at £2 a month. What you do is try to upgrade them – you phone them and try to convert them from £2 a month to £5 a month.” Or more. Nearly half will stop their direct debits within a year, but charities are banking on the others staying longer, and increasing their donations.

Sarah, who is in her mid-20s, has worked for GoGen since 2011. She feels much of the criticism is unfair, particularly the idea that every elderly person the charity calls is vulnerable. “The reality is, not every 91-year-old can help us with a direct debit, but some can, and we’re never going to know unless we call them.” She insists she has never felt uncomfortable about asking someone for money. “We’re not evil people who are trying to prey on vulnerable people. We are trying to make a living, and some of us have a passion for the work. It’s not your average cold-call centre – we’re not sitting here trying to sell double-glazing or PPI or whatever. If I make a call for the British Red Cross and I [get someone to give] £10 a month, I know that gift is going to be helping someone.” She is motivated, she says, by a desire to help: “When the earthquake in Nepal hit, the moment I heard it had happened, I called [work] and asked if I could pick up a shift. I wanted to be a part of that fundraising.”

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Others worry about the impact of the negative press – and any future tough regulation – on the charities. Oxfam has already suspended telephone fundraising, and Cancer Research UK told the Daily Mail they have stopped their contract with GoGen. “It has been astonishing to see allegations that any charity, or our organisation, has ever specifically targeted vulnerable or elderly people,” says Philip, a call-centre fundraiser who works at Listen, the company investigated by the Mail on Sunday. “This is untrue and unfortunately changes public opinion of our work.” He says he enjoys his job – he has been at the call centre for four years – but his description of workers’ days sounds tightly controlled: 10 minutes of break time allowed during each three-and-a-half hour shift, with half an hour between shifts for lunch; there are targets set for number of donations, and the average value of donations they bring in is monitored by supervisors.

“Although it’s for charity, it’s a sales job and a sales environment,” says Alex Love, now a web editor and comedian, who worked for one agency in 2010. “To do well in sales you’ve got to have a particular mindset.” Of the 20 people he trained with, he was the only one left after a couple of months, and he only lasted a year. He remembers one campaign he worked on where every person he called must have been in their 80s or 90s – people who gave an annual donation at Christmas, but who he was trying to get to sign up to a regular direct debit. “I couldn’t do it again. You’ve got a script in front of you that is carefully crafted to be emotive, and it was just forcing people to part with money.” Some days he says, with a quiet laugh, “you would just be grateful when there was no one answering the phone”.

Some names have been changed