Four face-to-face fundraising advocates have signed up with the Public Fundraising Regulatory Association to defend and promote the mechanism in the media.

Ex-director of fundraising at NSPCC Giles Pegram (pictured), consultant Ken Burnett, academic Professor Adrian Sargeant and Rowena Lewis, executive lead on the Philanthropy Review, have all agreed to put themselves forward as spokespeople on face-to-face fundraising when news organisations attack or investigate the subject.

While no charities or their employees are advocates in the first group, Ian MacQuillin, PFRA head of communications who developed the scheme, said that the foundation advocates will likely be speaking to charities also, and that there will “probably” be charity advocates announced in the future.

The launch of the advocates, who will be independent from the PFRA and not briefed to toe the line of the PFRA’s public relations, follows the organisation’s strategic decision, announced earlier this week, to cease defending face-to-face fundraising as a practice publicly, and concentrate on discussing best practice and regulation.

MacQuillin told civilsociety.co.uk that the fact that the advocates do not work for charities, many of which are associated with the PFRA, is a positive in that it demonstrates that they are truly independent of the association.

“PFRA’s main role is to regulate the sustainable use of face-to-face fundraising on streets and doorsteps,” he said. “Almost by default we’ve fallen into the role of defending and advocating the medium. Sometimes I can tell that journalists don’t trust what I’m telling them. They’re thinking: well you would say that, it’s your job to defend your members’ interests. When that happens in the future I can tell them they don’t need to take the PFRA’s word, they can talk to Giles, Ken, Adrian or Rowena.”

MacQuillin had approached the four advocates to be part of the scheme for their individual experiences and perspectives. They will be called on to speak on different aspects of face-to-face fundraising and have already identified what media they’d prefer to appear in, should they be asked.

The F2F Advocacy Scheme has been in development since late 2009, but was given additional urgency by the difficulty the PFRA had in encouraging charities to defend the mechanism when it was attacked in a Newsnight programme.