The top fundraising executives at Cancer Research UK and Save the Children have predicted that changes to the Code of Fundraising Practice will cost their charities money in the short term, but said the amendments are still necessary.

Speaking in the wake of a Daily Mail expose of alleged bad practice at telephone fundraising agency GoGen, which worked on behalf of many household name charities, Richard Taylor of CRUK and Save the Children’s Tanya Steele told the Institute of Fundraising’s National Convention that the code needs strengthening.

Taylor is currently chair of the IoF, while Steele heads up the Standards Committee, which sets the code.

“There will probably be a financial impact in the short-term,” said Steele.

But she said that because the changes will strengthen what fundraisers do, fundraising income should “rebalance over time”.

The Fundraising Standards Board chief executive Alistair McLean said that if changes to the Code do result in lost millions, charities need to question whether that money was “freely given, with pleasure”.

Last month the British Red Cross director of fundraising, Mark Astarita, publicly estimated that the changes to the Code the FRSB proposed following the earlier media furore over the death of poppy seller Olive Cooke would cost his charity £2m a year in lost fundraising revenue.

Taylor encouraged charities to do the modelling and determine how much changes, such as not knocking on doors with ‘no cold calling’ stickers will cost them, and to share that information with trustees.

Fundraisers, he said, are put in a difficult position by trustees who sign off on sometimes difficult fundraising targets. “We need to go back and renegotiate those targets,” he said.

In the meantime, he said, “We have to expect a decline in some channels in the short term”.

Taylor too, however, was optimistic about the long term environment for fundraising – should the sector manage to restore and retain public trust and confidence.

“It will level out over time because of levels of trust,” he said.

Steele said that charities still command high levels of trust among the general public, and that she and many fundraisers view supporters as friends and colleagues. Protecting that trust is integral, she argued.

“This has hit a very deep public nerve,” she said. “This is a moment to stop, reflect and listen.”

Fundraisers called to meet minister

McLean and Peter Lewis, chief executive of the IoF, were forced to leave the convention today for a crisis meeting with Rob Wilson, minister for civil society. The meeting was called following the Daily Mail story, in which Wilson was quoted as calling the practices of GoGen callers “immoral”.

Both leaders expressed frustration with the approach to self-regulation reform taken by Wilson, arguing that the sector needs more time to get reforms right.

“We’re asking the minister to give us some space,” said Lewis told the convention. “We are asking you [fundraisers] to work with us to develop solutions to complex problems.”

“We need to take time to get this right.”

McLean echoed the sentiment, but said that the sector could not afford to drag its feet on the issue. Ahead of meeting Wilson he said “We need to speak strength to power.”

Code compliance enforcement needs strengthening

Lewis said that the sector needed to be mindful that most fundraising is done to an extremely high standard, and warned against the temptation to self-flagellate. He said, however, that the Daily Mail story presented practice that “none of us would be proud of”.

Tanya Steele suggested that there was significant room for increased monitoring and mystery shopping of fundraising, but also said that would require more funding to regulatory bodies.

“We’ve been running [self-regulation] on a shoestring for far too long,” she said, calling for a fundamental reconsidering of how the sector supports self-regulation.

Speaking to Civil Society News afterwards, Steele said that she supports the sector investing to ensure that the self-regulatory bodies have adequate resource, but that charities must balance that against a need to direct as much money as possible towards beneficiaries.

While seeing a place for improving compliance, Steele said that the Institute’s Standards Committee felt that the code could be strengthened in parallel.