Earlier this year we announced our new research partnership with BMG Research Limited to look into the complaints that charities receive directly about their fundraising activities. Since then, we have been working closely with their research team to get ready to start inviting charities to take part in the project.
The research will look into fundraising complaints that charities receive between April 2026 and March 2027. It replaces the data collection carried out in-house by the Fundraising Regulator for our previous Annual Complaints Report (ACR Part 2).
An important part of looking into the types of complaints charities receive is to be able to share research findings with the whole sector. By understanding more about complaints, we can all learn more about how fundraising for valuable and vital charitable causes can be made more effective. Where certain fundraising approaches prove more challenging and provoke complaints, this research will help us and the sector better understand why.
Our previous ACR Part 2 research took a survey approach. This new project will be similar, but an online portal has been designed as a data collection tool. Participant charities will have the chance to prepare the data requested in advance and then submit via the portal. Each participating charity will first be asked to respond to some simple screening questions, which will make the research experience more bespoke for each charity. To save time, charities will only see requests for data relating to the type of fundraising they carry out.
From mid-May 2026 a sample of around 500 large fundraising charities, registered with the Fundraising Regulator as levy payers, will be contacted via email by BMG who will provide more information about taking part and the data collection process. The Fundraising Regulator will not know which charities agree to take part in the research.
We have worked hard with BMG to develop a simplified, accessible and efficient online portal for charities to get involved. It has been important to us to make joining in as easy as possible. The more charities that agree to take part, the more we can all learn about current fundraising practices. We therefore hope as many of the charities contacted by BMG as possible get involved and share their experience.
Although only large charities are being invited to join in right now, later in the project medium sized and small charities will also have the chance to participate. We will announce more about that in the coming months.
In the meantime, we are asking all Fundraising Levy payers to look out for an email from BMG Research Limited. If you get one, it means you have been selected to be in the research sample. Taking part is likely to be of particular interest to charity complaints, compliance or supporter relations teams so please encourage your staff to pass the invitation on to the most appropriate person when it arrives.
See our blog from 2025 to find out more about why we have been redeveloping our approach to our complaints research.
If you have any queries about the research you can contact us at [email protected]