Chuggers/fundraisers should take your first "no" for an answer

[Parkingmoan1]

I've just been walking through the town centre on my way to catch a bus and was caught by one of those fundraising groups who accost you in the street.

As soon as she started talking to me I politely said no thank you, I don't have the time to talk and carried on walking. Instead of taking that as my final answer she chose to walk alongside me saying "I'm a fast talker" and continued her speech.

I felt a bit intimidated to be honest, she was quite loud and bolshie whereas I don't like confrontation and hate things like this.

I said I don't have any spare money, she said if I didn't want to make the one off payment to the cause (£25 bloody quid) the magazine they're selling is "only" £5.

I ended up buying the magazine just so that she'd leave me alone.

AIBU to think they should have to take your first "no" as an answer and leave you be?

Not that it makes it any better but I assume the value of 10 months of direct debit is what the company is paid per “victim” so the charity wouldn’t disclose it like any other supplier it gets services from. Still gross though.

In my experience (former auditor) they don’t wait around. They have teams that deal with this and they are relentless. It’s not marked as future income as they technically become entitled on the person’s death. It’s a debtor from the minute they find out an approximate amount.

Smee and Ford is the big name in this area. Direct from their website:

Our experienced reporting team read over 5,000 Wills per week in order to identify and report charitable bequests and ultimately notify organisations of these gifts.

Smee & Ford’s notification services provide:

Timely and accurate information on forthcoming legacies
Notification of named legacies within weeks of probate
Advanced notification of discretionary legacies
Information on any new charitable trusts or additional funding
We offer three different notification services; Named Legacy Reports, Discretionary Services and a Charitable Trust Service. Read on for more information on what is covered by each service.

Not that it makes it any better but I assume the value of 10 months of direct debit is what the company is paid per “victim” so the charity wouldn’t disclose it like any other supplier it gets services from. Still gross though.

When we say 'the first ten months of your donations', do they actually get it diverted to them monthly, assuming that the money does come in - or do they get given a lump sum by the charity as soon as they sign you up? If somebody agreed to £5 a month to get rid of an aggressive and intimidating chugger and then immediately cancelled the direct debit, does that mean the charity would just hand them £50 as a reward for harassing you, meaning that their mugging would have cost the charity £50, rather than supporting them? If that's the case, they really are incentivised to be as bullish and unrelenting as possible, aren't they?

I’d like to know this, none of the charities I ever audited used chuggers so I’ve not seen it in practice.

In my experience (former auditor) they don’t wait around. They have teams that deal with this and they are relentless. It’s not marked as future income as they technically become entitled on the person’s death. It’s a debtor from the minute they find out an approximate amount.

But, whether they like it or not, if you've been left X% of the proceeds of the sale of a house, the house has to actually be sold before the proceeds come through - and house sales can take a considerable time from marketing to completion.

I totally get them wanting to be kept in the loop and updated along the line, but how can it be considered reasonable to start harassing grieving relatives to rush everything through, just so that they can get their money ASAP?

Do they also have a say as to which buyer's offer is accepted? Say you have an offer of £300,000 from somebody who seems like a shifty chancer with no realistic means of ever being able to pay that much, and an offer of £290,000 from a genuine proceedable buyer with all the documents and loan agreements ready and all stacking up - would the charity be able to insist that you waste your time by going with the cowboy, before they inevitably delay forever and then expect to beat you right down - all because they (theoretically) would stand to get an extra £100 (based on 1%), against all the (very obvious) odds?

When I reluctantly agreed to buy the magazine she then tried to strong arm me into buying two for £10

Of course she did - and if you'd been foolish enough to sign their direct debit you'd have been hounded with calls for an increase

If it's not your charity of choice, the only thing really is to go on saying no, and if they still persist to ask them calmly to stop harassing you

Yes this is the situation that my posts re my MIL are about.

They didn’t necessarily know she had made a bequest during her life. But once probate was granted their enquiry agents found out and they harassed constantly to get the cash. There was no house to sell because FIL was alive so it was a case of transferring her ISA to him and getting the cash out. And of course it was some time after she’d died as a grant of probate takes a while.

You are also bang on about not giving them a % of anything. Say you leave them 50% of your house and your kids 50%. They will claim that a house worth £500k is worth £600k. If the property is sold they get their half whatever it is, but if the family wants to keep the house so there is no actual sale price to go on, the charity will push and push to get bought out at “half” that’s far too high. Rather than take it to court many families will pay the £50k.

As to the question about accepting the offer - it is a matter for the executors who they sell to provided they act in accordance w their duties as executors to maximise the estate - that isn’t purely a matter of selling to the apparent “highest bidder” as your example shows. You can in principle sue the executors as a beneficiary but I think in that scenario it would be hopeless. The more common scenario is a sale at an undervalue to someone who turns out to be a relative of the executor!

If you have trouble being assertive, a good tactic is to just completely ignore them. Look away, and don't respond to anything they say to you.

If they knock on your door, just close it without saying a word.

The blue cross pissed me off they just kept ringing me endlessly for donations during my working hours, I work in a busy NHS clinic doing dressings and I can't keep answering the phone. I had to get really shitty with them in the end and say no more calls.

I completely agree with you, I am just commenting on what I observed. Where the % is unknown they recognise the most likely amount and then chase and chase. I do wonder how much is spent employing the chasers vs how much extra value they get over just waiting. I’ve seen wills contested by charities where their % has been lowered just before the person’s death too.

After I said no thanks to one, for a major charity, the bloke said maybe I wasn’t fully aware of what the charity did.

Er, yes I am, thanks - and probably a great deal more than you are, since a dd has worked for them for over 10 years, including in post-tsunami/post earthquake disaster zones.
That shut him up!

Brilliant.

As a pp said, once they have you hooked in they don't stop. I have a similar story...

I once signed up with a monthly magazine some years ago - 2009-ish (they had reps standing in the shopping centre trying get people to sign up.) I quite fancied the magazine, so I signed up and paid £18 for the year. (£1.50 per issue instead of £2.25 or something like that.) The £18 came out of my bank account 2 weeks later. No problem. Got my first magazine the following week. Great!

About a month later, I got my second magazine. THEN shortly after, I got a phone call from the head office of this magazine asking if I would like to sign up to this special offer.... For just £50 pounds they will send me £125 worth of high street vouchers. I was like, 'what? That sounds amazing. Explain more.'

She said 'so.... It's vouchers for Debenhams, Marks and Spencers, House of Fraser, John Lewis, Harrods, Waitrose, Zara, Body Shop, blah blah blah blah blah. You will get £125.00 worth of vouchers for around 15 shops and stores.' BUT - as she went on it turns out it was £5 off this at House of Fraser, £5 off that at Marks and Spencer, £3, off off this at Waitrose, and £7.50 off that at Harrods blah blah blah. And a £10 off voucher if you spend more than £100 in 'Next.'

I then realised it was just a bunch of £5 off here, £2.50 off there and £7.50 off here vouchers on 90% of shops I NEVER go into. So I declined. 'No thanks I will just leave it. I'd never make any use of the vouchers,' I said. ' Oh, okay,' she said. End of call.

About a week later I was looking through my internet banking, just checking a few transactions. And I looked at my direct debits. There was a message there saying 50 pounds was due to go out of my account (to this magazine) the next day. So the bloody woman had actually gone and done it anyway. I cancelled the direct debit immediately and it didn't go out.

Hilariously, the 125 pounds worth of vouchers came to my house a few days later. After a few days, I started to get phone call after phone call. (I never answered they left messages,) demanding the 50 pounds - or the vouchers back. I picked up the phone after the 5th or 6th time, and told the man that I had actually refused and declined these vouchers, and didn't want them, and they should never have tried to take the money out of my account.

I said go listen back to that phone call. I said 'no, I don't want these vouchers, I will never make use of them!' And the woman said 'Okay then.' The man on the phone said 'you need to send back the vouchers.' I said 'I never asked for them, indeed I REFUSED them, and you still sent them, so YOU come get them if you want them' and then I hung up and blocked their number.

They sent me a letter threatening legal action if I didn't return the vouchers. I wrote back and said 'knock yourself out, see you in court. I didn't spend them. I haven't asked for them. I didn't want them. I wasn't interested in them.' After my letter saying 'see you in court,' I never heard from them again. Weirdly though, I did get the other 10 copies of the magazine, which were automatically set up to come out - and I had paid for them!

Also, the vouchers only had a 3-4 month deadline on them anyway! A few months later I just shredded them!

Anyone who has unpleasant experiences with these chuggers should complain to the council. Chuggers have to apply for a licence and there are clear rules about their conduct. Complain to the council every single time.

I am agog at the charity just putting through the additional cash!

No sense at all that this is fraud.

I am agog at the charity just putting through the additional cash!

No sense at all that this is fraud.

I think an awful lot of 'charity' behaviour skates very close to what most people would consider unethical, but does sometimes veer into illegal territory. How is it really any different from a scammer demanding that you need to pay them £X to 'fix' your Windows 'problems', even when you've made it clear that you're not interested? Those vouchers sounded of very low inherent value - just like any old magazine coupon promotion - and were almost certainly given free of charge to the charity.

We used to have a man who brought an apparent charity magazine (only about 12-16 A5 pages) to our door every so often (when he felt like it, it seemed - often with 'double' issues that were no bigger but were nevertheless twice the price). Family Life Club, I think it was called. It was so clearly marketed as being 'supporting' children with liver cancer (iirc), with pictures of children in hospital on the cover, two or three very basic, generic articles and a couple of wordsearch-type puzzles. A load of boring rubbish, obviously - just a way of making your donation regularly.

We just assumed that it was the kids' cancer charity who produced the magazine and guessed that the man was either a kindly volunteer who gave up his time for free or possibly for his expenses and/or a small commission. It turned out, when we read the very tiny print, that it was basically an independent business that gave something like 2% of their profits to the charity and pocketed the rest!

I think it should be illegal to exploit a genuine charity and get donations or sympathy purchases - that nobody would ever give/make if it weren't for the charity angle - when less than, say, 85% of the money actually goes to the charity. Which is worse: asking for money honestly for me and keeping all that I get, or asking for money 'for charity' and keeping 95% of it for myself, knowing that I will end up with far more than if I hadn't exploited the charity's name?

Then again, loads of big High Street names are in on it with things like charity Christmas cards - that sell for a premium, but only a few pence from each one is actually seen by the charity. I'm amazed that it isn't illegal, frankly - especially considering that there are (a few) normal, commercial businesses out there, run by ethically-minded people, that quietly give more of their profits to charity without ever mentioning it to customers than do the ones selling things 'for charity'.

I was in Stratford (London) today at Westfield Shopping Horror Centre and walked past some Inside Success people (and also a couple of people with clipboards wanting to survey how to make Stratford better) at the bus station and they all completely ignored me. The only difference I can think of is that I was wearing a mask.

After Stratford I went to Holborn where someone (I didn't spot from which organisation) did try and engage me when I wasn't wearing my mask. I said 'no thank you' and they backed off immediately.

I'm tentatively concluding that a mask repels chuggers ;)

The charity-wills stuff that people have shared is astounding, I had no idea.

Jo

Yes, thank you for the information about how charities behave wrt legacies. I should have known this, based on how big charities operate generally, but I'd never joined the dots before. Awful

I give lots to charity but I specifically choose local charities, international charities with low to no overheads and very specific, documented outcomes, women's refuges, etc.

I would never give a penny to a charity that employs chuggers, and particularly I would never ever give a penny to oxfam,who are especially appalling even among a dodgy bunch.

I am re-animating this zombie thread to share a recent ITV News story about Inside Success aka Inside Success Union CIC (the 'chuggers' that OP encountered). The Fundraising Regulator has asked them to tone things down quite a bit.

• Anti-knife crime group Inside Success Union accused of harassing public to raise cash (1 August 2023) ITV News
https://www.itv.com/news/london/2023-08-01/anti-knife-crime-group-accused-of-intimidating-public-to-raise-cash - with a video which includes an interview with former employees and someone from the Fundraising Regulator.

The Regulator actually published its report earlier this year in March https://www.fundraisingregulator.org.uk/more-from-us/resources/inside-success-union-cic-march-2023

Apparently they received "more than a dozen complaints over two years", I'm surprised it wasn't more. As they're not a charity then technically they're not supposed to be fundraising and should just be selling the magazine, however the nature of the complaints made it pretty clear that some of the staff were hassling people for donations: "None of the complainants indicated they had been pressured to buy a magazine or sign up to a subscription; only to donate.^"

More stories, including Daily Mail, via Google https://www.google.com/search?q=fundraising+regulator+inside+success

I had an encounter with them a couple of weeks ago at Mile End station and they did actually accept my 'no thanks' on first go.

Jo
^they're a social enterprise, or a CIC = community interest company

I wonder why they are allowed at railway stations actually - presumably there's no financial benefit to Network Rail or the railway companies so just tell them no. There's no need to create extra stress for passengers when they are waiting for trains.

Poppy sellers are fine because they don't hassle you.

I think the best policy is just to ignore these people and blank them out. Same with the overly pushy street vendors and beggars who you encounter at tourist destinations. A lot of them will take any interaction, even a "no thanks" as a sign to keep pressuring you. You don't owe them your time.

I had one of these a few days ago. I stopped his long spiel politely and said I already have charities I donate to regularly. He immediately asked me aggressively which charities they were. I stopped being polite at this point, told him to mind his own business and shut the door on him.

"No, sorry, I am in a rush" I use it every time, and I do not stop walking. They can't argue with it, because I am not going to be late for a hypothetical appointment to chat to a random chugger.

Unbelievably rude. A friend of mine was once approached by a chugger seeking sign ups for Amnesty. Friend said “I’m already a member.” The chugger said “yeah right.” My friend got out his membership card. He was absolutely furious and cancelled his membership. Told them why.