Supporter Commitment

What SBH Scotland does matters to you but how we do it matters as well. We make this Supporter Commitment to you...

Supporters can be assured that we have never practised any of the following types of fundraising:

• We do not practise door to door or street fundraising
• We do not wealth screen
• We do not purchase cold mailing lists to mail or sell data with other charities
• We do not purchase lists of potential donors and cold call at home
• We do not carry out excessive email or postal mailing to individuals. Our mailing lists come via events, those who have donated previously to us or other networking contacts. We also have a clear opt out for those that we do contact
• We do not call donors at home without prior permission. We only call in relation to a specific fundraising conversation
• We do not use any third party fundraising agencies

We make this commitment to you in addition to adhering to the Scottish Fundraising Guarantee.

The Fundraising Guarantee was created by the Scottish Fundraising Standards Panel which promotes fundraising standards and deals with fundraising complaints relating to Scottish registered charities. The Guarantee is a positive statement about values, culture and practices and outlines to the public how they can expect to be treated by fundraisers and charities in Scotland.

We also follow the Fundraising Regulators UK wide Code of Fundraising Practice and follow their guidelines when applicable in Scotland.

We will treat you with respect

We will be polite whenever we speak to you. We will not pressurise you. We will stop asking when it is clear you do not want to give. We will respect your privacy.

We will not sign up a supporter who is confused about who we are, or about what we do. We will not sign up a supporter who cannot afford to make a donation. We will follow the Institute of Fundraising’s guidance on people in vulnerable circumstances.

We will be honest and open

We will tell the truth and we will not exaggerate. We will do what we say we are going to do with donations we receive.

If we do ask a third party to fundraise on our behalf, we will make this relationship and the financial arrangement transparent.

We will commit to high standards

We will adhere to the Code of Fundraising Practice set by the Fundraising Regulator. We will comply with charity law and fundraising law. We will monitor our fundraisers, volunteers and any third parties that work for us to ensure that they adhere to our high standards in fundraising.

We will let you know the difference your donation is making

We will make it easy for you to see where your money goes; how much money is spent on support services and how much is spent on fundraising and running costs. That way you will know your donation is making a difference. This information is available in our annual report and audited accounts

We may write to you or email you from time to time with news about the work that we are doing and our fundraising activities.

We will communicate with you based on your wishes

From time to time we may write or email you to tell you about our work. We will not contact you too often and only in relation to events that we think may be of interest to you, or to update you on how we have used your donations. In every letter or email we will clearly communicate on how you can contact us if you decide you would prefer to stop hearing from us

If you want to stop hearing from us, just write, phone, email, or click on the link in our emails. We will always take action so do get in contact with us.

We will also regularly ask supporters to complete a survey to check how we are doing (including whether we’re sending you the right amount of information).

We will not pass on your data

We will keep your personal information secure and will only use it to communicate with you, to process orders and donations, to keep you informed, for analysis and to improve our activities. We will not share your details with other charities or sell it to businesses. Some organisations help us with our fundraising, but they will only use your data on our instructions. Full details of how we process personal data is set out in our Privacy Policy.

We will take complaints seriously

We will consider all your feedback carefully, both compliments and complaints.

We get very few complaints, but we take every one we receive seriously. We will get in contact with you quickly to investigate. We aim to resolve your complaint within 20 days. If our fundraiser has behaved inappropriately, we will take action. We will keep you informed throughout the process. Full details of how we resolve complaints is set out in our Fundraising Complaints Policy.

We will also report on the number of complaints we receive in our annual reports.

If you have any thoughts or questions about this commitment please email us.