David Ainsworth looks at the key figures from the FRSB complaints report, and finds a trend of consistently rising public dissatisfaction.

Yesterday the FRSB published its annual complaints report, which contains information on complaints about fundraising received by 1,338 FRSB members during 2014.

The headline figure appears to be that complaints are up by 8 per cent on the previous year, but I was a bit suspicious about that number.

It’s certainly attention-grabbing, but it doesn’t really mean much in isolation. After all, the number of charities contributing information to the report is up by 11 per cent, although asks are up by less than 1 per cent. So we don’t know why that 8 per cent increase is happening.

Remember that this covers a period before the furore over Olive Cooke, so the cause is not the recent publicity.

Is it indicative of a problem, or can we explain it away by saying it’s just because more charities are signing up to the FRSB?

Isolating the trends

Fortunately the FRSB responded helpfully to a request for clarification, and isolated some figures on like-for-like increases in complaints – ignoring the new-member effect. This measured complaints reported by charities which responded in both years, and found a 5 per cent year-on-year increase.

But even so, this doesn’t tell us much in isolation. One year’s figure could be random noise. What about previous years?

In the previous year, the trend was much more marked. Then, total complaints rose from around 33,500 to around 48,500, but complaints reported by charities which had never completed the survey before were fewer than 6,000.

This means the rest of the increase was attributed to charities which had previously filled out the survey, most of which is probably a like-for-like increase.

So like-for-like growth between 2012 and 2013 was likely to have been around 9,000 complaints – around 26 per cent. That’s obviously a massive jump.

Update: FRSB has now confirmed that the like-for-like increase was actually 28 per cent, based on a sample of 903 charities which completed their return in all the years.

I’m slightly suspicious about this increase.

It seems too large, and I’m tempted to see if we can explain it down a bit. Did the FRSB change the way complaints were reported? Was the 2012 year too low? Were there a lot of charities which for some reason completed the survey in 2011 and again in 2013, which would bring down the like-for-like figure?

All of that aside, it looks like there’s a clear point. Even if the 26 per cent figure is too high, it’s obvious there was a big jump in complaints between 2012 and 2013.

The year before that, the FRSB reported in less detail, as part of its annual report, so we can draw less firm conclusions.  The report showed that complaints were around 29,000 in 2011, 18,000 in 2010, and just 9,000 in 2009. Again, I’d love to know like-for-like figures, but the fact remains: these are all big jumps.

So even if we accept that FRSB membership has risen steeply, and members are recording complaints much better, it looks like complaints are on the rise, and in a big way.

Quite possibly 2014, with its mere 5 per cent rise in like-for-like figures, was actually the best year for a while.

What type of asks cause complaints?

FRSB reports stats for many types of ask, which are best split first of all into advertising and direct.

Advertising makes up 95 per cent of the asks – this has grown hugely in the last few years – but it generates only 2 per cent of the complaints.

So basically, it’s being asked directly which bothers the public.
In particular, four things: direct mail, telephone fundraising, doorstep fundraising and clothing collections.

And really, one thing in particular – direct mail. While direct mail volumes have apparently stayed constant over the last six years – around 200 million items of mail per year – complaints have trebled to over 16,000. Direct mail attracts roughly one in three of all complaints.

This most recent year paints a slightly different picture to previous ones. Three of the big four fundraising methods actually showed relatively little movement this year. Direct mail complaints were down slightly, for the first time ever.

The one significant mover was clothing collections, which were up by approximately 50 per cent, leading to an increase of around 1,300 in complaints.

Why are complaints rising?

There are three possibilities here. First, complaining is getting easier. Second, fundraising asks are getting more annoying, and third, fundraisers are asking more.

We can’t rule out the first option. All industries are seeing big rises in complaints, because firing off an email from your phone is now easy as pie. That makes it very hard to prove that fundraising is actually winding people up more.

It’s hard to tell for sure, but for most fundraising streams, asks and complaints seem to be rising proportionately – charities are asking more, and that’s what’s winding people up.

Arguably, though, direct mail is just getting more annoying: the volume of asks has stayed basically the same, but complaints have tripled.

Previously, I’ve heard some people advance the argument that it doesn’t matter if fundraisers annoy the public more, so long as no particular piece of marketing is getting more annoying. This was highlighted in comments on our story last year about the rise in complaints, where several people said, in effect “What does it matter if complaints are up, so long as asks are up by the same amount?”

This seems a flawed logic, especially because in the same time that asks have risen and complaints have risen, fundraising income has remained completely steady. Of course it’s been a tough financial environment, with more charities entering the fundraising market, but even so, these figures show that charities are fighting harder and harder to keep the same sized slice of the same sized pie.

I’m also not convinced by those who say that complaints are tiny in number compared to asks. They are, but as the recent weeks have shown, that’s not indicative of public satisfaction.

Firstly, each person probably receives a large volume of asks before they get annoyed enough to complain. Second, much of the point of the recent weeks is that too much fundraising is directed at people who don’t have the capacity to complain.

And third, most people just sever their relationship with the charity and join the Telephone Preference Service, rather than actively making a complaint. Or they suffer in silence, getting ever more annoyed but not doing anything about it.

Every journalist knows that for every person who moans, there are a hundred who are annoyed but don’t say anything.

Complaints are a minority sport

Almost half of all charities reported no complaints. On the other hand, somewhere between 25 and 30 charities were responsible for almost half the complaints.

Basically, there are a handful of big charities which generate almost all the complaints.

What we don’t know, because of the anonymised nature of the FRSB report, is how those complaints were split up. Are there one or two charities which get more than their fair share?

If so, is it common knowledge who they are? I suspect the answer to both is yes. And if so, can the other fundraising directors, who are in effect catching their flak, begin to hold them to account?