/complaints
ACCOUNTABILITY
Complaints
How to tell us we behaved badly, who can do it, what happens next, and how long each step takes. Including the parts of this procedure that are weaker than we would like at our current size.
01
First — is this actually a complaint?
Three different things get sent to the same inbox and need different speeds. If yours is one of these, the pages below get you a better answer faster.
Someone has been harmed, or is at risk
Any concern about the safety or treatment of a person by anyone connected to us — including whoever is running us.
Go to: Safeguarding →
A figure or a fact on this site is wrong
A price, a count, a claim or a piece of arithmetic that does not match its source.
Go to: When we get it wrong →
You want to stop or change a gift
Cancelling, pausing, changing an amount, or asking what a gift became.
Go to: How to stop, change or ask →
Everything else belongs here: how we behaved, how we communicated, a decision that felt unfair, a promise we did not keep, or the way we handled something you already raised.
If you are not sure which of these it is, send it here anyway. Working out where it belongs is our job, not yours.
02
Who can complain
Anyone. People who received our help or were refused it, donors, applicants, partners, people who work with us, journalists, and people with no connection to us at all who think something here is wrong.
You can complain on someone else's behalf. You can complain anonymously — with the honest limitation that we then cannot ask you anything or tell you the outcome, so the result is usually weaker. You can complain in any language; we will translate rather than ask you to.
Complaints go to info@i-h-c-p.com. There is no form to fill in, no reference number to quote, and no requirement to have given us money.
03
The three stages
Tell us directly
Whoever is closest to what happened
Most complaints are a misunderstanding, a bad reply, or something we simply got wrong and can fix straight away. Stage one exists so that fixing it does not require a process. If this resolves it and you are satisfied, it ends here — and it is still recorded.
Ask for a review
Someone who was not involved in the original decision
If the answer at stage one did not settle it, say so and it is looked at again by someone else. You get the reasons in writing, including where we disagree with you and why. Disagreement is a legitimate outcome; silence is not.
Take it outside us
A regulator, funder, or authority — not us
If you are still not satisfied, you are entitled to escalate beyond this organisation, and we will tell you who to escalate to rather than making you find out. We will not treat going outside as a betrayal.
You do not have to work through the stages in order if the complaint is about the person who would handle stage one. Say so, and it starts at stage two.
04
How long each step takes
We acknowledge within
3 working days
We answer within
15 working days
A stage-two review within
30 working days
If something will take longer than this, you get told that it will and why, before the deadline rather than after it. A missed deadline with no message is itself something to complain about.
05
What you get, and what we do with it
An acknowledgement that a person has read it. A decision with reasons, including where we think you are wrong. If we got it wrong: what we are changing, or an honest statement that we are changing nothing and why.
Every complaint is recorded, including the ones we do not uphold. Once a year we publish how many we received, how many we upheld, and what changed as a result. Complaints that reveal a factual error also appear individually in the correction log.
06
What we will not do
We will not treat complaining as disloyalty, reduce or withdraw anyone's access to help because they complained, or make a resolution conditional on you keeping quiet about it. No settlement we offer will ever include a clause preventing you from talking about what happened.
We also will not close a complaint by outlasting you. Going quiet until someone gives up is the most common way organisations dispose of complaints, and it is the specific behaviour this page exists to rule out.
07
What is still open
Stage two is weak at our current size
"Someone not involved in the original decision" assumes there is such a person. Today there may not be, and until there is, a stage-two review is a second look by people close to the first one.
Stage three has no named destination
Who you can escalate to depends on where we end up registered and who regulates us — which is not settled. Until it is, we cannot honestly point you anywhere specific.
No annual complaints summary exists yet
The first one is due after the first full year of operating, and will be published even if the number is embarrassing.
A complaints procedure is judged by whether people who complain feel it was worth doing. That is not something we can assert here — only something the people who use it can tell you.
