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Our complaints policy

The Brain Tumour Charity (‘The Charity’) values each and every person with whom we come into contact. We are committed to providing a high quality service across all areas of The Charity and working in an open and accountable way.

Your views are important to us and we value your feedback. By listening and responding to your views we can continue to improve our services and our fundraising practices. If something goes wrong, we need you to tell us about it, so we can respond in a positive way and put things right to ensure that they do not happen in the future.

We therefore aim to ensure that:

  • Making a complaint is easy and straightforward.
  • We deal with all complaints in a prompt and polite way and, when necessary, in a confidential manner.
  • We respond to complaints in the right way, ensuring we are fair and consistent, letting you know the outcome and giving an apology if we have got something wrong.
  • We learn from our mistakes and use your complaint to make improvements
  • To provide our definition of a complaint
  • To define our commitment to you
  • To outline how you can make a complaint to The Brain Tumour Charity
  • To tell you what will happen once you have made a complaint
  • To let you know what will happen if you remain dissatisfied
  • To define an unwarranted or unjustified complainer
  • To advise you how we use your personal information.

The Brain Tumour Charity defines a complaint as an expression of dissatisfaction with The Brain Tumour Charity, including the services we provide, our fundraising and/or the behaviour of any member of staff, volunteer or Trustee and that requires a formal response. This can include, but is not limited to, a complaint against:

  • The level of service that we provide
  • Our fundraising practices
  • How we use your data
  • The tone or language used by a member of staff
  • A claim that the information provided was inaccurate
  • An accusation of inappropriate behaviour.

You will be able to continue to use the full range of services offered by The Charity during and after your complaint, no matter what the result and you will be treated fairly and with respect at all times.

If you have a complaint, please contact us with as many details as possible indicating what you feel has gone wrong.

To make your complaint please send it to the relevant email address, so that the correct member of the team can investigate it. If your complaint is about a member of staff, a volunteer or Trustee, please send it to our HR Team at [email protected].

For all other complaints, please send it to [email protected]

  • We will acknowledge receipt of your complaint within two working days of receiving it, letting you know who will be dealing with it. If the complaint requires investigation, we will assign it to a member of the team who is independent of the events complained about.
  • We will then investigate your complaint. We will do that as quickly as we can but may need to speak to various people to find out what happened, what may have gone wrong and what we will do to rectify it.
  • We will inform staff or volunteers of any complaint about them or actions for which they were responsible and ensure they have an opportunity to respond as part of our investigation.
  • We will then respond in writing (by email) within 10 working days of the date acknowledging your complaint, setting out the conclusions we have made, any lessons learnt and any actions that will be taken as the result of your complaint (for example, changes to our services, policies or procedures). This may simply be an apology if appropriate for your complaint.
  • If we need to make further investigations and cannot meet these timescales, we will keep you up-to-date and let you know how long we expect it to take.

All complaints are logged, along with a copy of all correspondence and outcomes, on our secure database. Complaints are regularly reviewed to ensure we identify any trends or wider learning.

The Brain Tumour Charity endeavours to respond to complaints quickly and effectively. However, we recognise that, from time to time, people may be unhappy with the response we provide. If you remain dissatisfied with our response to your complaint, we will escalate this to our senior leadership team, who will try to understand why you remain dissatisfied and discuss how your complaint can better be rectified.

If your complaint is about fundraising, you will also be given the details of the Fundraising Regulator who you can contact for an independent investigation. If your complaint is about our use of your data, we will provide you with details of the Information Commissioner’s Office, who can conduct an independent investigation.

An unwarranted complainer will be defined as someone who has had their complaint investigated and was found not to have a legitimate cause for complaint but who refuses to accept the outcome and continues to raise the issue with The Brain Tumour Charity.

An unwarranted complainer can also be defined as someone who is seeking a personal vendetta against an employee or a volunteer of The Brain Tumour Charity.

If it is thought that an individual is an unwarranted complainer then they will be issued with a warning letter explaining that their complaint has been deemed closed and that persisting with this complaint may lead to a ban from the services.

Any new complaint issued by someone who has been given a warning letter will be treated without prejudice and handled in the same manner as any other complaint.

A ban from services following a warning is at the discretion of the CEO.

Any personal details you share with The Brain Tumour Charity will be used for purposes connected with resolving your complaint. Your information is stored on our secure database in line with our privacy policy. We never share your details with other organisations for marketing purposes. If we need to share your details with a third party to investigate and resolve your complaint, we will inform you of this before sharing.

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