Clothes Aid’s response to the Fundraising Standards Board (FRSB) adjudication assessment
Today (Thursday 04 August 2016), the FRSB has released its report in to a complaint against ourselves and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC). The complaint was adjudicated at the FRSB’s complaints process on 21 June 2016. To view the background of the complaint and full adjudication review click here.
To summarise, the FRSB has concluded that:
• We did not have adequate procedures in place to ensure that the complainant’s wishes were respected. As such we have failed to abide by the ‘respectful code of fundraising practice’.
Clothes Aid takes all complaints very seriously. In our 20 year history as the UK’s largest, licensed commercial clothes collection company, this is the first FRSB complaint adjudication of its nature but every complaint is hugely important to us, so we therefore deeply regret that this particular complaint has reached the FSRB to be resolved.
We take full responsibility for all of the errors identified against us by the FRSB report and offer our sincerest apologies to the complainant for hindering their right to privacy and not putting in sufficient enough internal procedures to ensure that such errors were made in the first place.
We would like to reassure the complainant, the wider general public as well as all of our partners and partner charities, that as an immediate response to this complaint and the FRSB’s findings, we have now implemented a series of robust internal processes to prevent a future incident occurring:
These include the following:
• we have conducted an overhaul of our training programme to fully address the matter of ‘no bag’ requests to ensure that all new processes adopted are fit for purpose,
• we have reinforced the company’s adherence to our complaints procedure and no bags policy across our entire collection network,
• we have produced a package of brand new training materials for our collection network in multilingual languages to include new posters and handouts with revised messaging on them, and
• we now operate a centralised ‘live suppression list’ for our staff to upload addresses which have requested no further bag deliveries. This is accessible to all our charity collection managers who are required to check the list daily to verify that appropriate addresses have been deselected from their maps.
Michael Lomotey, Business Manager for Clothes Aid said:
“It is with huge regret we have received this complaint, but I believe that the mitigating processes we have now put in place will protect and prevent from any other future incident happening of this nature.
We have fully taken on board all of the findings and recommendations of the FRSB and through regular reporting and tighter account management with our charities, I feel confident that this will contribute towards stopping any similar future complaints being made.”
For further information, please contact: Olivia Farnesy on 07796 396193 or email: ofarnesy@clothesaid.co.uk.
