There's one more industry opt-out scheme to cover: the Fundraising Preference Service (FPS). This is the most recent junk marketing opt-out scheme and it works a lot better than the opt-out services we have sniffed looked at so far. The scheme was launched in 2017 as part of an overhaul of the charity fundraising industry, whose aggressive marketing techniques had come under fire in 2015. It is run by the Fundraising Regulator, which was also created in the aftermath of the scandal.

In a nutshell, the FPS lets you opt out of charity marketing. Specifically, you can stop unwanted marketing letters, emails, phone calls and text messages from individual charities registered in the UK. The initial proposal was to let people opt out of all charity marketing from all UK charities but that idea was abandoned. The Fundraising Regulator felt that such a "reset button" would result in people blocking charities they might still want to hear from, and they were concerned that charities that don't do unsolicited marketing would suddenly need to maintain GDPR compliant opt-out lists. So, the nuclear option was abandoned. Instead, the website lets you select individual charities you don't want to hear from. You can select up to ten charities in one go.

In practice, the service is mainly useful to force individual charities to stop pestering you with junk marketing. I used the service myself to stop junk marketing from a charity I supported. Shortly after I set up a direct debit they started asking for more money. They ignored a polite request to stop such appeals, and so I cancelled my standing order and used the FPS to make sure I will never hear from them again. They haven't targeted me since.

Branch-specific opt-out services

I started this guide by having a go at self-regulation. The FPS is an exception to much of what I wrote on that page. The opt-out service is run by an independent regulator and it applies to the entire charity sector. Its website is user-friendly and contains lots of information about exactly how the service works. The opt-out scheme is also reviewed periodically and, even better, the Fundraising Regulator publishes these reviews, including details about the opt-out rates (which are very low) and the cost of running the service (which has been scaled down because of the low demand). In many ways, the FPS is a shining example of how self-regulatory opt-out schemes should be run. But, the FPS does have a problem: the service shouldn't exist.

As said, the idea behind the FPS was to give people a quick and easy way to opt out of charity marketing. In itself, that is a good idea — I am all for making stopping junk mail quick and easy. However, it is also a bit… weird. We don't have an opt-out scheme for marketing from, say, the fast food industry or the real estate sector. It is hard to see, then, why we need an opt-out service for marketing materials produced by the charity sector. It just doesn't make sense to start creating marketing opt-out schemes for specific industries.

I am in good company here. Both the Information Commissioner and the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee were less than impressed by the proposal for the FPS. They argued that the FPS was redundant, mainly because marketing via email, phone and text message is already covered by the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PERC). The rules are fairly strict as well — organisations need to have your permission to target you and can tell them to stop at any time.

However, both the Information Commissioner and the parliamentary committee ignored the elephant in the room. There is, in fact, a reason why the FPS was needed. Without the FPS there wouldn't be a quick and easy way to stop charity junk mail. You see, the rules for junk mail marketing are nowhere near as strict as the rules for phone and email marketing. Charities only have to check if someone is registered with the MPS if they are a member of the DMA, and very few charities are. Without the FPS, charities could simply rely on the legitimate interest basis when targeting people with unsolicited appeals. In effect, it would be business as usual; as long as they could trick people into not opting out they could continue to bombard vulnerable people with begging letters.

The FPS solves that problem, as opt-out requests made via the service are enforceable under the UK GDPR. However, the obvious cost is that we have yet another opt-out scheme. It would have been much easier to require all charities that send unsolicited charity appeals to rely on the consent basis or to mandate the use the MPS suppression file. The reason that didn't happen is that the UK has a weird soft spot for charities. People seem to think that charities can't do wrong, even though that misconception is precisely why charity fundraising become so vile that the government felt the need to scrap the industry's self-regulatory framework.