The implications of the Olive Cooke case are so much bigger than fundraising

On 20 May 2015 a story broke in the British newspaper The Daily Mail that has been making big waves for UK based charities. It was the tale of Olive Cooke, a volunteer who sold poppies for the Royal British Legion for 76 years but who killed herself, apparently in part due to feeling hounded by charities asking her for money.

“Mrs Cooke, from the Fishponds area of Bristol, dedicated 76 years of her life to raising money for the Royal British Legion and is believed to have sold around 30,000 poppies. She also supported numerous charities and at one point received 267 charity letters in one month asking for cash, leading to suggestions the hounding for money pushed her to take her own life.”

Mrs Cooke’s family have been reported as saying that “the amount of contact from charities was starting to escalate and get slightly out of control, and the phone calls were beginning to get intrusive, but there is no blame or suggestion that this was a reason for her death” but this has not stopped the media and politicians from arguing hard that fundraising self-regulation is not working. Queue lots of hand-wringing, discussion, debate and promised action within bodies such the Fundraising Standards Board (FRSB), Institute of Fundraising (IoF) and occasional contribution from NCVO, ACEVO and the like.

Fundraising does indeed have some lessons to learn from this case. Self-regulation isn’t perfect, improvements do need to be made but, frankly, nobody within the system has ever claimed it to be perfect. Having spent six years as a member of the IoF Standards Committee I have seen the development of fundraising self-regulation from the inside. I can personally testify that issues which at first appear simple and obvious are rarely so and that those calling for quick and easy solutions simply reveal their ignorance of the fundraising world.

But this blog is not a defence of fundraising and attempts by fundraisers to self-regulate. No, my fear is that by following the tragic death of Mrs Cooke with a myopic focus on fundraising, the voluntary sector (third sector, civil society or whatever you want to call it) will miss some key lessons that should be learnt.

Lessons that speak to the fundamental nature of professional [1] charities in the 21st century.

Lessons that arguably have a more profound impact on public trust than whether the mechanics of fundraising self-regulation are completely effective (if that were even an achievable or realistic goal).

You see in all the reporting and subsequent discussion & debate about the implications of Mrs Cooke’s death, nobody in the sector seems to be placing any value on the 76 years of committed volunteering service she gave to the Royal British Legion. These many years of service get barely a passing reference in the developing narrative about what lessons can be learnt.

I believe this speaks volumes about the current state of British professional charities. Charities where the donated hour of a volunteer is given subordinate status to the donated pound of a donor.

Look at the language there.

Donor is someone who gives money. Giving is the act of giving money. Time doesn’t factor. Giving time doesn’t count. Who cares if Mrs Cooke had 76 years service as a volunteer, so long as she upped her donations by a few pounds a week [2].

Charities have all kinds of resources at their disposal to achieve their missions. The moment any mission driven, non-profit organisation sees money as the main or sole driver of them bringing about social change is the moment it becomes no different to a for-profit corporation.

Businesses have to have money to grow, to develop, to produce, to serve etc.. Charities do not. Sure, money is nice and it allows us to do things we might not otherwise do, but it is not all there is.

21st century professional charities have to accept that people are getting less and less tolerant of being asked to give more and more money when they have less and less to spare. They have to develop and strengthen alternative ways of resourcing their work, letting go of outdated orthodoxies that money is all they need.

Volunteering is one such alternative resources and I would of course argue needs to taken far more seriously. In fact that is a regular theme of my blogging as frequent visitors to this blog and my writing for Third Sector online will know. But it needs to go further than that. An attitude shift across the sector is needed, not just amongst fundraisers.

For example, if senior managers push fundraisers to generate more and more income because those managers have no concept of how anything can be achieved unless it is paid for by cold hard cash, then it is unsurprising if the public feel might hounded for donations.

If staff are wasteful with money (as sadly they can be) then that contributes to the need to generate more and more income.

If staff refuse to consider working with any / more volunteers, insisting that only paid people can do anything meaningful in a charity, then they also contribute to pressure to raise more funds.

Fundraisers alone cannot be held responsible nor can they be the only ones expected to learn from this. If they are then I fear the sector will learn little from the sad death of Olive Cooke.

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1. I stress professional here because when we talk about ‘the sector’ we tend to be talking about the small but high profile minority of charities who have fundraised incomes and paid staff. The vast majority of good causes have little or no income and operate solely through volunteer effort.  ↩

2. I should point out that the Royal British Legion whom Mrs Cooke volunteered for has not be accused of being one of the charities who pursued her for donations. No link between her volunteering for them and them pursuing her for money is drawn or implied.  ↩

Volunteering and the floods: questions and lessons

As is typical when disaster strikes, volunteers are right there in the front line of relief efforts. The current flooding in the UK is no different. Whilst official agencies are criticised for being slow to act, volunteers are getting on with the job of practical help and support to those affected. 

Note: Nobody is complaining about job substitution now!

This volunteer led support is being woefully under-reported by the bad-news-fixated media. The best example of reporting I could find was from Tuesday when Sky News reported on their website how flood victims were being helped by the ’best of British’. 

Interestingly, from my searching online this morning I could find little information from the existing volunteering infrastructure - NCVO, volunteer centres etc. - on how people can get involved in flood relief efforts. 

What reference I did find was largely related to pre-existing, formal volunteer roles that require training and official deployment. For example, Do-It make mention of flood volunteering on their site, directing people to the British Red Cross and Community Resilience. Both links send people to information on opportunities that look like ones which don’t really seem geared to people who spontaneously want to help. The Red Cross itself has a news story online about how its volunteers are supporting flood affected communities. This links to information on becoming one of their emergency response volunteers - also a role that requires training.

What about spontaneous volunteering, people just wanting to help because they see a need and want to get involved without going through weeks of training and induction?

Interestingly this is where there was more information, but none of it linked to the existing volunteering infrastructure. Instead the main focus was on a new initiative called Flood Volunteers. 

Flood Volunteers has been set up by the private sector entrepreneurs behind TaskHub, a site for finding professional services such as plumbing etc.. According to the Metro newspaper and ComputerWeekly.com, the Prime Minister asked the founders of TaskHub to set up Flood Volunteers to aid the support efforts. People simply say how they are willing to help and affected people can link up with them for help.

For me all this raises some important questions:

• Why is the government not turning to the existing volunteering infrastructure for help in deploying spontaneous volunteers? 
• If it did, does the volunteering infrastructure have the resources to be of help at times like this?
• What should be the role of national volunteering infrastructure bodies like NCVO and NAVCA (to name just two) in co-ordinating with government and the relevant agencies to ensure the great British public’s spontaneous help is directed most effectively?
• What plans do the existing volunteering infrastructure have in place so that they are prepared to be of real help in times like this by channeling spontaneous volunteer support to the right places?
• Who is ensuring that the spontaneous volunteering that is happening is being done safely and actually helping, not hindering, relief efforts? We might not realise it but people wanting to help can actually cause more problems than they alleviate, a situation explored in detail by Jayne Cravens on her webpage, Volunteering To Help After Major Disasters.
• Who is monitoring whether people actually follow through on the pledges of support? Take a look at this story (again reported by Jayne Cravens) following the floods in Queensland, Australia three years ago where this was an issue.
• What is being / will be done to see if these spontaneous volunteers who are making a real difference in flood affected communities might want to put their time into volunteering when the flood waters subside?

Quite rightly the focus now is on on helping those affected by the floods. As the efforts move in the coming weeks into cleaning up and moving on, the media will inevitably focus on the lessons learnt from the floods. There will be calls for better flood defences, more funding for flood hit communities, an examination of the political point scoring that seems to be more important to some politicians than helping the people in need.

But will we in the volunteering movement learn any lessons?

Will we be more prepared next time? 

Five problems I have with Dan Palotta’s TED talk

The non-profit world seems to have been buzzing lately at the TED talk by Dan Palotta, “The way we think about charity is dead wrong”. It’s easy to see why. Dan puts forward some compelling arguments that the cultural attitudes which view ‘admin costs’ (or overheads as he terms them) as a bad thing rather than as an essential part of a charity’s work. I particularly like Dan’s observations about confusing morality with frugality and his quote, “When you prohibit failure you prevent innovation”.

Of course, Dan’s arguments are nothing new. I can recall hearing fundraising expert Prof. Stephen Lee speak on this very topic years ago. He argued that when people object to, for example, 10% admin costs, fundraisers should respond by saying something like, “Thank you for your donation of £100. We spent £90 helping our clients and are using the other £10 to help raise another £100”.

For all that’s good about Dan’s talk - and it really is worth checking out if you haven’t seen it yet - I have five problems with it.

First, he seems to assume for-profit is bad and non-profit is good. His examples illustrate a mindset that private business is out to make things worse for people whilst non-profits are out to make things better. Of course, he isn’t entirely wrong - there are some truly appalling companies. But the truth is that there are for-profit businesses that genuinely want to make the world a better place (and make some money in the process) just as there are some non-profits who, sadly, exist to benefit the few at the exclusion of the many. In a world of grey, Dan’s assumption of black and white absolutes is flawed.

Second (and related), Dan seems to work from a basis that there are clear delineations between for profit and non-profit. Perhaps that comes from a differing cultural start point - he is American and looks at the issues in a USA context, hence the lack of reference to a public sector - but surely the boundaries are increasingly blurred. Take Dan’s own start point of social entrepreneurship as a case in point, a concept that sees private and voluntary sectors blurring together in different ways from old concepts of them being distinct and separate.

Third, Dan seems to assume that non-profits are driven to change the world, addressing the root causes of the problems their beneficiaries face rather than just treating the symptoms. But is that really the case? For some organisations the answer is a resounding yes. For many though, I’m not so sure. 

If you genuinely want to solve the problems of the world - or at least a group of individuals - then your fundamental belief has to be that your purpose it ultimately put yourself out of business. Why? Because your non-profit will no longer be needed when the problem is solved. 

When NSPCC sought to do this via their Full Stop campaign (seeking to end child cruelty) they were criticised by some for being naive in assuming that such a goal could ever be achieved. 

We also seem to have a worryingly prevalent mindset in some corners of the sector that charities exist to give people paid employment. Losing a job is a painful process - I know, I’ve been there - but if it is so the vulnerable can be better served then objections indicate that we actually believe that sector jobs are more important than the people we are employed to support?

Fourth, Dan seems to imply that large organisations are good. His argument is that whilst non-profits are hampered from growing so they are being limited in what they can achieve.  In other words, the bigger a charity is the more it can do to change lives. This may be true sometimes, but where is the evidence? Some large non-profits are incredibly wasteful, inefficient, unresponsive behemoths out of touch with the beneficiaries. And some aren’t. Big does not automatically mean better.

Finally, Dan speaks as if the only resources that can be deployed to solve social problems are those that can be bought. In keeping with the general trend in the narrative about the UK voluntary sector, he keeps talking about money raised as if it is the only way to resource the work of non-profits. This simply isn’t true. Such a belief misses out on the incredible riches of volunteering. 

The vast majority of the UK voluntary sector is led, driven and run by volunteers, not paid staff. Only a comparably small number of charities employ people but, because of their size, the have a disproportionately loud voice so they are the ones we hear about. Failing to acknowledge the contribution of volunteers to good causes is to ignore perhaps the most precious and valuable asset any non-profit has. This is the key missing ingredient in Dan’s otherwise helpful talk.