Cancer Research UK will no longer share donor data with other charities and has pulled out of the donor data swapping service Reciprocate.

Cancer Research UK - the UK’s most successful fundraising charity, raising more voluntary income than any other charity - told Occam, the company behind Reciprocate, that it will stop participating in the donor data swap scheme as of October this year.

Reciprocate allows charities to swap the details of responsive direct mail donors with other similar charities. The two charities then arrange when to email their campaigns to these donors, careful not to overlap mailings.

Nick Georgiadis, head of donor development and legacy marketing at Cancer Research UK, told Civil Society: 

"Supporters are at the heart of everything we do at Cancer Research UK as we receive no government funding for our life-saving research. Following a recent review, as part of our commitment to our valued supporters, we have now pledged not to share our supporter data with other charities. This would include the Reciprocate programme."

Ross Watkins, marketing director at Occam, said that CRUK had cited a change of strategy as the reason to leave the scheme, but remarked that the charity "never really used Reciprocate in a big way".

"We find quite a lot of charities come in and out of the scheme," he said, adding that one big-name charity had already done just that this year.

While Reciprocate used to advertise response rates of up to 20 per cent, it currently states that response rates of between 9 and 12 per cent are normal for direct mailings using the swapped donor lists.

Some charities which had swapped donor details with CRUK are still owed data, which Watkins said they will have to request and use by October. All these charities have been notified by Occam. This could see past supporters of CRUK reciving a glut of mailings over the summer months.

Watkins said that Reciprocate was still performing strongly and was popular among charities. "The steady interest is still very much there," he said.

Occam was bought out earlier this month by marketing and printing company St Ives. Watkins said that the sale was according to the business plan and that St Ives plans to leave Occam running as it has been.