The Fundraising Regulator has today announced that is has scrapped its annual complaints report and will not publish complaints for two years.
It will conduct a review of the purpose and content of the report, in consultation with the sector.
Following this, a “far more meaningful and qualitatively impactful” new version of the report will be published in the summer of 2020 and cover the financial year 2019/20.
In the meantime, there will be shorter annual reports published for 2017/18 and 2018/19, with data collected from around 60 charities who spend the most on fundraising.
Stephen Dunmore, chief executive of the FR, said the 2019/20 report “will mark the start of a new complaints analysis process for the longer term”.
“The Fundraising Regulator is committed to developing a thorough, useful and thought-through complaints report that provides real insight into the nature of fundraising complaints and how they can be resolved," he said. "This will be of real value to the regulator and the sector."
Daniel Fluskey, head of policy and external affairs at the Institute of Fundraising, said he was pleased that the regulator was reviewing its complaints report.
He said: “Getting a better understanding of the nature of complaints is really important to continually improve fundraising practice and it’s positive to see the Fundraising Regulator set out a detailed and process for revising the report for the future.
“We look forward to engaging with the Fundraising Regulator on this to represent the views of our members so that the new complaints report can be as useful as possible for identifying trends and gaining a better insight into the experience of supporters.”
In October, the regulator published its first report on complaints received by charities about fundraising since the regulator’s inception in 2015.
It received complaints reports from 893 charities, but this was way down on the 1,500 organisations that responded to the last report undertaken by the now-defunct Fundraising Standards Board.
The regulator said in its report that this disparity made it inappropriate to compare the two year-on-year.
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