Celina Ribeiro wonders why it is that neither of the major fundraising conventions this year has devoted more than one session to face-to-face fundraising.

Who needs chuggers? Bloody annoying young dreadlocked students who couldn’t quite make it to Thailand for the summer break, who needs them? I just want to get from work to the tube without having to pretend I’m in the middle of an important phone conversation. Is that too much to ask? Bugger them, they’re annoying, they’re niggling and they’re in my way.

While we’re at it, who needs face-to-face recruited donors?

Those 624,000-odd regular givers signed up by face-to-face fundraisers in 2009/2010 - the sector doesn't need them surely. They would have got them anyhow. Well, somehow. I don't know - via Twitter maybe. 

There are some areas of fundraising that are imagined as a dark art (legacies), cloaked in profitability, a certain level of mystery and subject of endless mini-conferences and sessions by the great and good at large national and international fundraising conferences.

Then there are other areas of fundraising, imagined more as a dumb art (face-to-face), requiring neither skill, innovation or self-awareness to succeed in what little ways it can.

I say this not to be mean to face-to-face fundraisers (although that is a very fun bandwagon to ride on), but because it seems to be the prevailing opinion of very respectable fundraising conference organisers. Neither of the Institute of Fundraising’s National Convention next month nor the International Fundraising Congress in the Netherlands have more than one session devoted to face-to-face fundraising this year.

Charities are investing heavily in face-to-face fundraising. New agencies like AAP are picking up work all over the place and established organisations are running at capacity for door-to-door campaigns for up to the next two years.

The demand for the medium is there. The medium is visible and it is bringing in significant numbers of donors into the fold. So is it really the case there is no demand for information about the method? Is it that face-to-face fundraising is still the naughty boy in class that the other good children are told not to play with (even though they’re frequently equally as naughty), or is it just that no one submitted any half-decent proposals for face-to-face sessions? Is face-to-face really that much less nuanced than direct mail?

The near-omission of the F2Fers from the programmes of the Resource Alliance and Institute’s flagship conferences may well be pure coincidence. Still, it does now seem the PFRA may need every day of its ten-year strategy to combat perceptions of face-to-face fundraising within the sector – never mind at Wandsworth Council.