Face-to-face fundraising jobs have historically been seen as separate to careers in mainstream fundraising, but a new research project aims to upend that belief.

A survey out today will aim to map the career paths launched by fundraisers who begin in street fundraising, colloquially dismissed as ‘chugging’. Recruitment agency Flow Caritas has released an online poll querying former street fundraisers about their career progress, and later in the research project will conduct qualitative interviews with up to ten fundraisers who began by pounding the pavement for charities.

The company said that while in the past the cliché that street fundraising was a stop-gap job for people more interested in other professions, this has changed over the last decade.

“It is now pretty obvious that a substantial number of former so-called chuggers have made this transition [into fundraising careers], people who may have been lost to charities had they not started out on the street,” said Flow Caritas’ managing director Rory White.

Christian Dapp, a former street fundraiser who is now direct marketing manager at the Brain Research Trust, argued that street fundraising provides a vital and rare entryway into mainstream fundraising.

“There’s doing an unpaid internship or there’s being a face-to-face fundraiser, for which you are grafting seven hours a day, out representing charities to the public and getting paid for your time,” said Dapp. “I get surprised and frustrated when people say chuggers should get a real job, because what could be more real than that?”