ABOUT time too… After all the furore over the summer about multi-million pound charities allegedly hounding people for donations through unsolicited mailshots and cold-calling, someone, somewhere has taken a more charitable view of how to treat potential donors.

The Institute of Fundraising, the professional membership body for UK fundraisers, will be amending its code of practice so that every ‘give us your money’ letter addressed to individuals has to carry a clear opt-out message. And not in tiny, hard-to-find print either.

Just as important is that charities will be banned from selling their supporters’ personal data and will only be able to share it if an individual has provided express consent for them to do so.

In addition, fundraisers who hit the phones to attract money will have to end their calls when asked, and all calls from agencies and call centres will have to be made from identifiable, rather than ‘no caller ID’ or ‘number unknown’ telephone numbers.

York Press:

Hassled: a woman giving her credit card details over the phone

All well and good and on the surface it seems to show a recognition of some charities’ brutal and persistent pursuit of often vulnerable people to spread their accumulated wealth, however meagre.

But it shouldn’t have had to come to this in the first place, should it? American author Terry Goodkind once said that charity, if you have the means, is a personal choice, but charity which is expected or compelled is simply a polite word for slavery.

They are words that could easily be applied to the antics of big charities who think nothing of spending the money people have donated in good faith to exhort yet more money out of others by what some would say to be nefarious means.

If I’ve donated to a charity I don’t mind too much getting a Christmas catalogue once a year. But I do object to my charitable donation being used to pay for the printing of sheets of tear off address labels for thousands of individuals, not to mention the postage spent in sending them out.

I also object to call centres calling when I’m having my tea in the hope of exhorting money out of me just to make me go away. It’s bad enough getting cold calls about phantom car accidents I’m supposed to have had without charities climbing on the call centre bandwagon as well.

It just doesn’t feel right. It’s all a bit tacky, not to say pushy, of charities to bombard folk for their cash using the much-hated societal ills of junk mail and cold calling. It hardly smacks of being well – charitable, does it?

Add to that the insane amount of donated cash being swallowed up in salaries for charity executives. According to one national newspaper nine executives in one UK charity alone earn more than the prime minister!

It’s no use trotting out the hackneyed argument that you have to pay top notch money to get top notch people into the top notch jobs. Because on current performance some of those charities paying salaries into six figures are likely as not some of the ones that are resorting to junk mailing and cold calling to pour yet more into the coffers. Hardly a good advert for paying high salaries is it?

Yet raising huge amounts of money without spending a fortune on the administration of doing so can be done if people put their minds to it.

In America there’s a charitable institution called the Pan Massachusetts Challenge that involves an annual 192-mile ride across the state of Massachusetts. It started 35 years ago with a bunch of blokes getting on their bikes to support a friend whose mother had died of cancer.

Today, more than 5,000 people take part from all over the world. Totals from this year’s ride are still being added up, but the 2014 event raised $41 million – that’s almost £27 million. And every year every single cent goes to a cancer research institute in Boston, which has global impact with its work. Since the ride began more than $455 million has been raised and not one dollar has been hived off for administrative purposes.

The Pan-Mass Challenge has just ten – yes, ten – full-time staff and two part-timers whose salaries are paid for not by those who ride and the friends and family who sponsor them, but through trusts and corporate donation.

And each year an army of nearly 3,500 volunteers give up their time to support the riders, with 200 companies and businesses providing more than $4 million in products and services.

It just goes to show what can be done when there’s a will and a way. So tell me this – why are we not doing the same here?