It is 20 years since face-to-face fundraising burst onto our streets and revolutionised individual giving. Despite its ripe old age, there is still life in the old legs yet, finds Stephen Cotterill.

Revered by some, reviled by others, face-to-face fundraising has been the biggest and most important game-changer in the sector of the last two decades. Strutting onto the boulevards of Vienna in the mid-1990s, it was the enfant terrible of fundraising practices; upsetting the Austrian church, smashing expectations and rewriting the rulebook. Since those heady days, international face-to-face fundraising has come of age, become more sophisticated and earned its place as the primary tool for acquiring new regular givers at many of the world’s biggest international NGOs.