Giselle Davies & Ellis Pugh report on the Fundraising Preference Service—the new weapon against ‘junk’?
- The Fundraising Preference Service was introduced to ensure the public has more control over the contact received from charities.
Developed from a recommendation in the Etherington Report of September 2015, the Fundraising Preference Service (‘FPS’) was intended to ensure that members of the public would have more control over the contact they received from charities. Launched on 6 July 2017 by the Fundraising Regulator, 6,305 ‘suppression requests’ have been received in its first month of operation.
To the dismay of some, the FPS does not work in the same way as the Telephone Preference Service (TPS), Mail Preference Service (MPS) or the Royal Mail opt-out from unaddressed mail. However, in conjunction with these pre-existing weapons may well successfully add to the arsenal that the public can use in their war against unwanted communications or ‘junk’.
In simple terms the FPS works by allowing members of the public to list charities from whom they do not wish to receive direct marketing. Once notified of one of these ‘suppression requests’ the charity
