After staying out of the face-to-face fundraising market for a while, Mencap returned to the street late last year. With internal buy-in to secure and fundraisers to motivate during some of the worst snow-storms in memory, Michael Naidu explains how the charity pulled off a really rather successful campaign.

The decision of a Leicestershire council to potentially limit house-to-house collections to campaigns which return at least 70 per cent of income to charity has been praised by the Charity Retail Association but treated with caution by the Institute of Fundraising.

The Public Fundraising Regulatory Association is to stop promoting and defending face-to-face as a fundraising method, leaving charities to stand up for the technique themselves.

Paul Amadi, director of fundraising at the NSPCC, has suggested that the number of regulatory and representative bodies in the charity sector is cumbersome and expensive, and called for the sector bodies to consider merging.