The director of compliance at the Institute of Fundraising has said that the membership body is launching a new call-levelling tool aimed at improving and standardising compliance in telephone fundraising.
Peter Hills-Jones, director of compliance at the IoF, announced that the call levelling tool was being developed at the membership body’s Face-to-Face conference in London on Monday.
He said the tool will be “freely available to members” and would be a way of providing “a degree of support, guidance and training” to internal staff “so they don’t have to rely upon their outsourced operations all the time”.
Speaking to Civil Society News today, Hills-Jones elaborated on the call levelling tool. He said it would allow for “peer-review of call monitoring and compliance” within organisations, and would be delivered through the ‘e-learning platform’ launched by the PFRA in January 2016.
“The system will allow for people to log into the module and every two months we’ll release a number of calls. They’ll be genuine calls, but they will be pre-recorded and anonymised for data protection reasons and you’ll be able to log in and listen to those calls,” said Hills-Jones. “Members will then be able to score those calls against a Code assessment form, and then you’ll score them as being compliant or not.
“So if five people from ‘Charity A’ all listen to the same calls, you’ll then be able to see what they scored differently. It’s not about having a one-size-fits-all tool, and getting everyone scoring calls the same; it’s about providing good quality data information back to managers about how their compliance staff and fundraisers are scoring calls.
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“It’ll allow a compliance or campaign manager to see how their colleagues are scoring calls, and then the intention is that that information will lead to a compliance case review within the organisation.”
Hills-Jones said that the calls would be pre-recorded transcripts of actual telephone fundraising calls and would be effectively dramatised by “actors” and members of staff from the IoF.
He said that the IoF was aiming to roll-out its call levelling tool for members in late May or early June.
‘A gap’ in compliance training for telephone fundraisers
The IoF’s compliance director said that the tool was devised after consulting with members who “felt there was a gap” in terms of easy to access and understand training around compliance and monitoring issues in telephone fundraising.
The e-learning platform, originally launched by the PFRA and bought across to the IoF when the two organisations merged last year, currently has four training modules all of which cover street, door-to-door and private site fundraising.
“The existing model covered street, door-to-door and private site fundraising and there are obviously similarities in terms of the rules across those types of fundraising,” said Hills-Jones. “But our members involved in telephone fundraising felt there was a gap.
“What we’re seeing in charities is that they’re definitely upping their game in terms of call monitoring. Charities are definitely doing more call monitoring and they are looking at more and different things around call monitoring to ensure that they’re both legally compliant and Code compliant and obviously those are two different tests that charities are having to meet now.
“One of the things that charities said to us was there was some inconsistency in how people were scoring calls when they were monitoring them.”
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