Today we publish a report of the findings from a survey of our large charity, small charity and commercial registrants.
The survey reveals that 92% of the respondents engaged with the revised Code of Fundraising Practice and over two thirds of organisations find the process of registering with us or paying the annual Fundraising Levy to be easy.
This survey is the first of its kind for the Fundraising Regulator since we were established three years ago. We sought the views of organisations that are registered with us to better understand what we are doing well and where we need to improve. The findings will help shape our future work and ensure we remain responsive to the issues facing the sector.
Key findings from the survey include
- 92% of respondents said they had engaged with the revised Code of Fundraising Practice, which was the first major redraft in almost a decade to improve the code’s style, presentation, clarity and accessibility.
- 75% of respondents agreed, or strongly agreed, that our main aim of improving the navigation of the code has been achieved.
- 73% of respondents have used our supporting guidance and information and, of those, 82% found it ‘helpful’ or ‘very helpful’.
- 75% of respondents who had read at least one of our Annual Complaints Reports told us that learnings from these were useful when reviewing their fundraising practices.
- Just over half of respondents (52%) have read at least one of our investigation summaries, and of those 70% told us that they had found them ‘useful’ or ‘very useful’.
- 21% of respondents had used our enquiries service and 69% of those that had used it found the experience to be ‘positive’ or ‘very positive’.
- 69% of respondents thought that the process of registering with us or paying the annual Fundraising Levy was ‘easy’ or ‘very easy’.
The anonymous survey of our registrants was conducted in November 2019, and included larger organisations that spend more than £100,000 on fundraising and fall within the fundraising levy, smaller registered charities, and commercial organisations. We contacted 3,782 organisations and 359 (9.5%) responded. Responses were representative of the three types of organisations registered with us.
Questions included whether organisations have been using the code and supporting guidance, how useful our fundraising complaints reports and investigation summaries are, how organisations use and promote the Fundraising Badge and experiences of using our customer services.
Gerald Oppenheim, Chief Executive of the Fundraising Regulator, said:
“Thank you to everyone that shared their views with us. This is the first time we’ve carried out a detailed registrant survey and we are encouraged by the number of organisations that took the time to complete the survey with such detailed responses.
Just as we encourage you to listen and respond to your donors, we also believe this is essential for us to do too, so that we are best placed to support the organisations we regulate. The results provide an important evidence base for our work in the year ahead and beyond.”
Click here to access the full report of the survey findings.