Abuse of Charitable Collections? The story of the Prostate & Breast Cancer Foundation Ltd. An organisation called the Prostate & Breast Cancer Foundation Ltd. (pbcf.org.au) is currently raising funds in NSW and WA by canvassing members of the public for entry into a telemarketing raffle. The PBCFs fund raising service is contracted to a professional fund raising company TFA Pty Ltd, a professional fundraising firm with an interesting history largely unknown to the public. The PBCF is currently being investigated by the NSW OLGR. The founding secretary/director of PBCF was Ms Leanne Maguire the wife of Mr Gerard Maguire the sole Director/Secretary of TFA. There were two other founding directors, both of whom are or did have a connection to NSW PCYC. One of these is Mr Reg Woodleigh the then General Manager - Marketing & Fund Raising at NSW PCYC. NSW PCYC was a client of TFA (for telemarketing fund raising) until mid-2011. TFA began the first PBCF raffle in late 2011. As early as late December 2011 the PBCF was repeatedly asked (online) about the identity of their directors. They did not respond. Ms Maguire resigned 13/03/12 about 2 weeks before the draw of the first raffle. Her letter of resignation was tendered in February. Inquiries were made because of suspicions stemming from past telemarketing raffles conducted by TFA. It is certain that the NSW PCYC as an organisation has had no involvement in the activities of the PBCF. It has also severed ties with TFA. Woodleigh has ceased employment there. Professional fund raising is regulated state by state and as a general rule the professional fundraiser will be commissioned about 60-70% of gross fund raising income, perhaps higher in some states eg in WA it might be as high as nearly 80%. Professional fundraisers bend over backwards in their efforts not to allow their telemarketing raffle customers to know this. The first official (ASIC) notice located the PBCF at PO Box 2140 Oakleigh, Vic. This is also the address of Ask Australia and Nation Wide Market Research two companies owned by Mr Gerard Maguire, the owner of TFA. The PBCF was registered 27/04/11. This date puts PBCF in the lap of Mr Maguires business well before its registration and the telemarketing campaign. After the departure of Ms Maguire (which followed insistent inquiries for information about the PBCF personnel) there was a raft of changes on ASIC records which achieved a removal of contact details that linked the PBCF to TFA. Ms Maguires seemingly perfunctory replacement was Mr Brian Rule the then Boxing manager and colleague of Mr Woodleighs at NSW PCYC. It seems Mr Rule had little knowledge of what he was involved in. His attendance at PBCF meetings it seems has been reduced or stopped. PBCFs website doesnt offer information about the people behind this organisation. This is in stark contrast to what would normally occur in a public benefit charitable organisation. It also stands in stark contrast to the behaviour of an organisation whose engagement with the public is legion through its countless unsolicited telemarketing calls. (“Hello, how are you today? Im from the PBCF. We want your credit card but don’t ask us who we are!”) Nothing that these people are doing is likely to be actually illegal. The parallel story of fundraising impropriety that you will hear about shortly also did not involve actually breaking any laws. These are the sort of people who think that whatever is within the bounds of law is OK, end of story. Though community expectations would have something to say about the propriety of these sorts of activities, the nature of the community engagement (telemarketing and a marketing style website) means that the community isn’t afforded the ability to make a comprehensive assessment of what they are supporting. But in WA regulators have acted against similar fund raising arrangements which coincidentally have links to TFA. These events are reported in articles in the West Australian (Sat Oct, 16 p.5 & 25 2010 & Fri Aug 26, 2011 p.2) available online for a small fee. (Digital Editions Past). These press stories report that the WA Govt deemed that the close relationship between some “charities” and a telemarketing fund raising business (Voice Works) was improper and the activities were stopped by denial of a fund raising license for one of the charities - Kids Cancer Australia (KCA). The close relationships involved the business owner (Rod Carter), or people he knew occupying offices of these charities (past or present). Such arrangements enable the granting of lucrative telemarketing fund raising contracts to the controlling private business which can draw large sums from the public in the name of charity and keep most of it as commission. The WA authorities reportedly deemed the arrangement as involving a “conflict of interest”. Token charities can be controlled, in fact established, by self interest groups in order to promote their own financial interests. The connection between the KCA/Voice Works business activities and TFA (according to long term employees of both companies) is that the two businesses worked side by side in the same building for some time in Victoria Park, WA. As Voice Works went into decline its telemarketing fund raising contracts were passed over to TFA. These contracts were Meals on Wheel NSW, Royal Life Saving Society Australia, NSW PCYC and also Kids Cancer Australia. Although KCA was acted against by the WA Govt (rejecting its application for a fund raising license in 2011) TFA continued to fund raise for KCA in NSW but not after the bad press appeared in the West Australian. The NSW license expired in 2010. The telemarketing spiels referred to KCA by the odd name of “Kids for Cancer”. This created confusion among supporters in that Kids for Cancer was thought to be the respected Kids with Cancer – people gave money to Kids Cancer Australia thinking they they were dealing with the genuine and respected Kids With Cancer. (Which conducts independent volunteer fund raising without using a commercial third party.) TFA also did a short telemarketing fund raising campaign for an organisation called KidzHelp Foundation Limited which is a part of the picture in that personnel of KidzHelp Foundation were also involved with Kids Cancer Australia – as was Carol Pragnall the call centre manager of Voice Works, a lady who had served a gaol term for stealing a large sum of money from an employer. In this case again the charitys name is similar to a respected one (Kids Help Foundation of New Zealand). Some directors were of New Zealand origin and name-pirating is a staple tactic of these types of operations. It is inconceivable that TFA /Mr Maguire were unaware of the corrupt nature of these two organisations which he was taking income from. The emergence of the PBCF and its entry into telemarketing fund raising may be seen as further practices which do not meet community expectations and abuse public fundraising. When the contract was entered into between TFA and the PBCF business between the two organisations could be conducted within one family: between a husband and a wife (Mr and Ms Maguire). When Mr Maguire introduced the PBCF fund raising campaign to the telemarketing staff at TFA he made some intriguing comments. He said that he was wearing his heart on his sleeve in relation to his interest in the PBCF - motioning with his hand to chest. He did not mention that his wife was the secretary/director or that Mr Woodleigh who had visited the TFA office at least once in the past (and who was introduced to staff) was also a director. Mr Maguire had referred to him at that time as “Cool Reg”. The contract with NSW PCYC , the organisation Mr Woodleigh worked for was by far the biggest of TFAs contracts until it was lost. Maguire had said that in discussions with friends about the PBCF fund raising campaign those friends had been impressed. He commented on the joining of these two cancers into a single organisation which the public may not normally link in their thinking. This is an important consideration because cynical abuse of charity fund raising often targets cancer and the coupling of these two cancers may be seen as a sales tactic to appeal to male and female raffle customers. The “unique focus on country areas” which is a part of the telemarketing sales spiel appeals to people called in those areas and widens the marketing target. Shrewd professional fundraisers are well aware that a common objection of people called in country areas is whether the money will support local services or whether it will only/mainly support better resourced urban centres. Early on in that first campaign he said that the PBCF campaign was “tracking” as well as the the PCYC campaign. Tracking is jargon for the financial statistical success of a campaign. Mr Maguire was asked by a skeptic during his introductory address to the call centre team (who made reference to the dubious KidzHelp Foundation) what this new organisation had done. He replied, “Not much, a bit if this, a bit of that.” They had in fact performed no charitable services and Mr Maguire had clearly rejected an invitation to be forthright about the status of this organisation. The PBCF bears remarkable resemblance to the type of charities set up to serve self interest by Rod Carter. As were the Rod Carter charities so too is the PBCF an unknown intrusion into the respective mainstream sectors. The charities posit an impressive agenda while being unequipped and ill prepared to do so. They lack community underpinning and relevant professional expertise and seem to have one area of expertise only – to raise money through telemarketing. And perhaps most importantly there is no sign of heart felt inspiration, the usual foundation of these type of foundations. The grounding question “Why are they doing this?” is the elephant in the room here. That they are not shouting about their inspiration from the rooftops or at least communication it in some way adds oddity upon oddity. Perhaps they are a humble, selfless mob? Like Rod Carters charities the PBCF has made unsolicited donations to other (recognisable) charities. Extraordinarily, in one case at least PBCF has shunned attempts by one of these charities to communicate with them. This organisation Life Force Cancer Foundation is no longer mentioned on their website. One of Life Forces directors is renowned Gabi Hollows. The board of Life Force was mystified by the large unsolicited donation they received from an organisation they had never heard of and who did not return their calls simply to thank them. One of the benefactors of PBCFs unsolicited donations already had its own fund raising raffle. Regulations as they stand do not seem to be able to stop these arrangements at the outset. They are a symptom of a growth of an industry that has turned the arrangements back the front such that professional fundraisers and token charities can in effect raise funds for themselves in the guise of conducting charitable collections and individuals can establish organisations which fulfill minimal legalistic criteria but serve the self interest of parties and individuals outside of charitable services. These arrangements are legal but in the manner of being technically legal or exploiting loop holes. It is thus possible for an organisation like the PBCF with no genuine community underpinning made up of unqualified, unskilled, uncommitted individuals of which most people would reckon have no business being in the field they have dropped into, and which exists as little more than a legal entity to approach the public and raise potentially millions of dollars most of which will go to a professional fundraiser. And this public outreach is being conducted within the confines of a short telemarketing call with poor quality, selective marketing style information and confusion with other respected charities. PBCF does not practice according to either the WA voluntary Code of Practice, the NSW Best Practice Guidelines or the FIA industry standards for professional fundraising. This is even more extraordinary because Mr Woodleigh cites telemarketing as an area of expertise on his LinkedIn blurb. These industry standards have been developed to prevent the unethical and unprofessional practices of professional fundraisers. By operating outside of standards of good conduct and ethical practice professional fundraisers know that they can make more money for themselves. When they can get away with it (which is nearly all the time) professional fund raising telemarketers rarely let on that they are a third parties working on behalf of the named charity they are fund raising for. TFA’s spiels (for all its clients) script telemarketers to identify themselves as “fund raising project officers working with [name of charity]” in order to trick the raffle consumer into thinking that they are in direct contact with a charity. This enables the telemarketing company to make more money for itself. There is also the risk that people contacted will conflate or confuse the PBCF with the respected and authentic National Breast Cancer Foundation and Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia. This has occurred. The call lists (lists of names and phone numbers) used by TFA fund raising for the PBCF were heavily numbered with supporters of respected legitimate charities such as the two mentioned above. This raises another can of worms which cant be addressed here about how professional fundraisers acquire their contact lists and the extent to which breaches of privacy and lack of consent contribute to those marketing databases. When it began its telemarketing fund raising the PBCF was advertising its address as a post office box at a well-known and respected major hospital Sydney. This suggested that the PBCF had a status that it manifestly does not and never will. Even now the PBCFs website is referring to the programs of organisations it does nothing but pass on its sub-standard telemarketing raised funding to as “Our Work” and refers to these organisations as “partners.” In the past the TFA telemarketers did (and probably still do) explicitly state that “we” are working hard at finding a cure to these two cancers as if they were a research laboratory. (The PBCF has splashed some images on its website of scientists peering down microscopes which will have the foolhardy telemarketing consumer believe that the PBCF is a medical institution.) This raises the issue of how unethical telemarketing can be and the need for telemarketers to be strictly supervised by standards of practice. The PBCF shuns these standards. There is no doubt that avoiding standards of good conduct enables professional fundraising companies like TFA to bring in more money than they could it they were required to comply with such standards. Perhaps this is the basis for Mr Woodleigh claiming to be a telemarketing authority as he does on his LinkedIn blurb. A lawyer who has acted for Mr and Mrs Maguire AND TFA and the PBCF also sits/sat as a director of PBCF - and commenced his office at the time PBCF became subject to scrutiny by the public and regulators. He has acted against a member of the public with letters threatening significant punitive damages which had the effect of intimidating (but not dissuading) that member. Mr Woodleigh has stated that Mrs Maguires entry to the PBCF was no more than the need to “get people on board” i.e. add numbers to what would then have been a 2 person organisation –yet a 2 person organisation which had already decided to launch a lucrative, wasteful telemarketing campaign with a sub-standards operator. And neither of those two people will reveal publicly why they would act in this manner or what professional or personal background gives context to their extraordinary actions. One would expect there to be some sort of reflection of such inspiration and commitment on the public website of such an organisation. Contrary to this the PBCFs website has nothing to say about these people or the experiences that gave birth to their outfit. The PBCF spectre shows how easy it is to exploit current fund raising regulations and misuse, waste and squander the public charity dollar. Even if you somehow conceive that the PBCF/TFA operation is honorable there yet remains the disturbing thought that a troupe of irrelevant mediocrities (at best) can be allowed to take the controls of a significant public fund raising enterprise – and from this dubious vantage, proceed to pass this responsibility onto a crude telemarketing sales steam operating beyond industry standards and who are profoundly clueless about the client they provide a raffle fundraising raffle ticket selling service to. The sort of formulated standards that the likes of PBCF and TFA ignore require the person being solicited to be given accurate information about what program is being fund-raised for. Alternatively, unscrupulous professional fundraisers adopt a method whereby the less a telemarketer knows the less able will they be to properly inform a prospect and the more able they might be able to “blow a sale”. It does not matter with respect to this that it is charities not the professional fundraisers who formally adopt the industry codes of practice, because in effect what overwhelmingly happens is that the professional fundraiser takes over the management of the fundraising entirely and applies whatever methods it chooses and the charity is usually clueless as to what is done in their name. And on top of this the fundraising manager within the charity may be happy to get as much money as the can without taking an interest in the methods used to get that money. This type of approach by charities using third party professional fundraisers is also proscribed by codes of practice. Self serving individuals may at once establish a tenuously manufactured charity which has no community origins as a vehicle for granting lucrative fund raising contracts to a telemarketing business in which a controlling interest officiates within both entities. And where up to 70% of the money generated (or more) goes to the commercial fund raising company and NOT to charity. And there is the real possibility that even funds raised (the little that is left over) can be used to benefit the directors. This may be happening but the PBCF refuses to answer my questions on this matter – ie whether or not Woodleigh is now receiving a personal income from a charitable organisation he was instrumental in setting up. According to its first and to date only publicly available (ASIC) financial report PBCF gave 5% (a little less in fact) of its income to charity. Note: the percentage returns from the fund raising raffles apply only to the raffle income. Once those funds arrive at the PBCF those % returns do not apply. Thus further wastage may occur in the way the PBCF acquits the funds acquired through telemarketing. When the money raised through telemarketing raffles arrives at the PBCF it is considered for the purposes of fundraising procedures to have arrived at a charity. This allows as little as 5% to be delivered to a charitable purpose. Other facts revealed in the report include: No relevant skills/experience or background (except fund raising) among the directors. Raffle ticket sales $514,372 COF (Cost of Fund raising) $277,352 Consultancy/merchant fees $11,288 “other expenses” $9,854 Total overhead expenses $72,097 Receipts from fund raising (FR) $550,558 PAYMENTS TO SUPPLIERS $376, 817 FR costs: telemarketing $218,114 mail out/dbase management costs $34,204, raffle prize $25,034 =$277,352. TOTAL COSTS OF SERVICES PROVIDED FOR CHARITABLE SERVICES/TOTAL INCOME RECEIVED DURING THE PERIOD: $25,000/$520,990 (5%). Doubtless it will be said that starting up a charity involves considerable start-up costs that will not imbalance future reporting. But don’t let that general truism be the cover for the devil in the detail. For start, even to take this organisation seriously, to respect it, would be a bridge too far for decent Australians (if they knew). And the very tactic of doing dark things behind the shadows of generalised truisms is the modus operandi of these types of groups eg, “Where from a charity that means we must be good so you should give us money - preferably on a credit card.” The PBCF has opened an office and moved from its original situation in Mr Woodleighs residence. It has employed a recently graduated “marketing specialist” and states plans to manage its own services though clearly lacks the expertise to do so. In a conversation with Mr Woodleigh he described a planned future service of transporting patients to appointments and bizarrely that a single such patient would represent “all of us”. The new office is a short walking distance from Mr Woodleigh’s residence . Mr Woodleigh is no longer employed by the NSW PCYC (from fairly recently it seems) and according to his LinkedIn Profile he has begun a position as director at PBCF since March 2013. Obviously it is in the public interest to determine how this position may be different from his original official position as director since inception of the PBCF in early 2011. Has Mr Woodleigh acquired a paid position from the charity he was instrumental in initiating? Inquiries have been made to the PBCF but, as is their wont, they have not responded. The worst case scenario would be that Woodleigh has acquired a job out of his charity and thus acted in a way which is inverse to public supporters expectations of charitable endeavors - and certainly a long way from what is revealed in the representations made to the public within their crude telemarketing calls. Calls which are made without respect to any existing standards of practice – of which 3 separate formulations could be applied to the PBCF telemarketing fundraising. The PBCF is not embodied in an association incorporated i.e. it is not a community group. It doesn’t have a community membership where people may put themselves forward for office and do so without expecting substantial remuneration. The PBCF is not democratic. It has referred to its fund raising as “community based”. This definition of “community based” means compiling a database of people who have given to charities before and then making countless unsolicited calls to exploit their track record of generosity without giving them an insight into the nature of what they are supporting. Or for example when cold calling to offer the telemarketers prize vouchers of up to $100 on top of their usual wage and commissions to whoever gets the most money out of the public on credit card. The PBCF is not a member of the FIA whose code of practice does not allow commission payments to fundraisers because it encourages mercenary methods of fundraising. Other PBCF fundraising practices contravene the industry standards of NSW and WA e.g. the TFA spiels instruct telemarketers to describe themselves as fund raising project officers with whatever charity they are doing third party work for rather than identify themselves as a contracted commercial operators ie calling and raising funds on behalf of a charity rather than (as they do) representing themselves as the charity itself. Nor is information about the distribution of fund raising income between charity and commercial operator provided in accordance with those recommendations. We ought to wonder how much the community needs this costly, inefficient charity which has no community structure, no relevant expertise, is a stranger in the sector and avoids public exposure except when addressing folks with telemarketing sales spiels that paint a grandiose picture if it’s worth, its activity and its benefits to public health. The PBCFs most effective function is in putting large sums of money into the hands of private business and private contractors and directing those resources away from charitable purposes.
Posted on: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 06:18:33 +0000
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