Organisations involved in face-to-face fundraising need to do more to contextualise the industry if the market is to avoid further scandals, warned the managing director of Home Fundraising.

Speaking to clients at the doorstep fundraising firm’s annual seminar last week, Dominic Will described what he saw as an “imbalance” between regulatory activity and education with “bodies [Institute of Fundraising, PRFA and FRSB] lining up to regulate and not a lot else” following the Hodgson review.

Explaining that the sector needed to “manage the message, both to stakeholders within this sector and to others outside so that when the Sunday Telegraph, and others, come calling they have got somewhere to go to find the important stats and the important information - it’s only going to get worse if we allow it to over the next 12 months”.

He called on charities in the room to be vocal about the money raised through door-to-door fundraising, saying: “Without a trade association or an Impact Coalition ready to take these messages on we have a collective responsibility to unify and communicate these principles.”

He also challenged the reports earlier this year that complaints about doorstep fundraising had doubled, following the publication of the FRSB annual survey, saying that Home’s own data showed complaints were consistent and that the increase could be put down to rising membership of the FRSB.

Will added that this, combined with the myth that the method was about reach its capacity, led to the danger that “senior people within the sector who may not be as close to the day-to-day reality of the actual fundraising campaigns” could arrive at the conclusion that “we should be doing all the door-to-door we can over the next 18 months or so because the market’s going to explode after that and is unsustainable”.