Fed up with charities cold-calling? New Fundraising Preference Service will let you o

So we are going to have a third preference service that doesn't really work.

I very rarely get calls from charities these days.

First, if a donation form has a box for a phone number, I never fill it in.

Second, if a charity looks up my number and calls me, I make it abundantly clear that I'm not interested in what they have to say. Their sales pitch always involves telling you about what wonderful things their charity does, before asking for money. If you don't even let them get through that initial sales pitch, then they are stuck.

The answer to all this is so simple, make cold calling illegal.


Then penalise the companies who instigate the calls. That prevents companies passing the buck and blaming their overseas call centres.

Anyone else see this as a major issue???

"However you won't be able to sign up vulnerable friends or relatives, even if they are receiving lots of fundraising calls, unless you have power of attorney"

Savvy_Sue wrote: »

Yes and no ...

It seems like a limitation, but it's not an unreasonable one - you may feel that it's in someone's best interests to sign them up for this, but they may disagree.

Having said that, who's going to know? I didn't have power of attorney, but had Mum's permission to use her email address to unsubscribe from anything she no longer wanted to receive. If she'd been troubled by phone calls, I'd have used her phone to register for this. And so on.

I get the "who would know" point (if that is part of TPS I have definitely broken that rule lol), it just seems ridiculous to put that in there when they are the people most likely to need it, and least likely to know how to.