A company fundraising for school sporting events committed six breaches of the Fundraising Code of Practice, with four education trusts also having broken a further two sections of the code relating to third-party fundraisers, the regulator has concluded.
An investigation by the Fundraising Regulator found that Sportivater, a commercial organisation that arranges sponsored sporting events for primary schools, breached code sections relating to solicitation statements and informing donors.
The complainant initially approached the Fundraising Regulator regarding the transparency of an event that Sportivater held at their child’s school, the case summary says.
The original complaint was outside the regulator’s remit since the school was not a charitable organisation, but a later complaint informed the regulator that Sportivater worked with a number of schools that were part of charitable trusts or independent charities themselves.
The regulator was satisfied with the changes that Sportivater made to its website following initial engagement, but it “agreed with the complainant” that some statements the company made to potential donors when organising events could be “misleading”, the case summary says.
It also agreed that although Sportivater had started to include more information about its process on paper sponsorship forms, the font used was “too small to be widely accessible”.
The regulator found the updated materials did not make it clear enough that the company might retain 100 per cent of donations if the event did not raise enough funds to cover its fee.
This breached the code’s requirement of giving potential donors enough information to make an informed decision, the regulator said.
The investigation also found that Sportivater’s first attempts to give the legally required solicitation statement were not code compliant since they were not detailed enough.
“The solicitation statement must estimate as closely as reasonably possible how much Sportivater will receive from each event,” the regulator said.
“We recognised this was difficult to calculate precisely, and suggested Sportivater could improve this by using statistics to estimate how much it would receive at a given school.”
The regulator found that Sportivater was cooperative overall and “made significant efforts to adapt their materials so that they are compliant with the code”.
The investigation also found two code breaches by a number of schools operated by charitable trusts in relation to their work with Sportivater.
These breaches related to rules around working with third-party fundraisers, although the regulator noted that it “would not necessarily have been clear to the schools at the time that they were entering into a professional fundraising agreement” with Sportivater.
The charitable trusts found to be in breach were: The Bonitas Multi-Academy Trust; the Chancery Education Trust; the Enquire Learning Trust; and the Venn Academy Trust.
The regulator recommended these trusts discuss this report with their trustees to identify learnings and consider how to share this with school staff.
It said Sportivater should make multiple changes to its marketing materials, including increasing the disclosure text size and to make it clear that donated funds will pay for the event in the first instance before going to a cause.
Michael Ledizion, chief executive of Sportivater, said: “Sportivater cooperated fully with the Fundraising Regulator and took immediate action to make changes as recommended by the FR.
“Though the information that we had been providing to donors was indeed complete and correct, it was not presented to potential donors at the time of donation, an omission that was rectified immediately in 2022 when we became aware of the requirement.
“We have also made changes to make the information clearer, as well as other changes to ensure that we not only meet standards set out in the Fundraising Code but that where possible we exceed the requirements.”
The complainant asked for an external reviewer to consider the regulator’s decision, the summary says, but the reviewer “did not think that the reasons for this request met the criteria for review as per our process”.
In a statement to Third Sector, the complainant said: “The summary contains factual inaccuracies that I have alerted the regulator to. My complaint concerned the fundraiser’s refusal to disclose the destination of £2,300 donated by parents, which remains unknown.
“The summary suggests I was ‘unhappy’ with a compliant proposed solution and then requested an investigation. In fact, the Fundraising Regulator acknowledged that its proposed solution was not compliant and withdrew it, and that it had failed to commence an investigation into the complaint already submitted due to an internal oversight.”