There is a change coming for face-to-face fundraising on the door, says Sally de la Bedoyere.

There’s going to be no tipping point that suddenly means that doorstep face-toface fundraising becomes the bête noir du jour, displacing ‘chuggers’ from their decade-long reign as the fundraisers the public and media love to hate.

But there is a shift in the climate around doorstep face-to-face. There’s no single significant factor that will be driving this change. But there are lots of factors combining to drive this shift in perception – more interest from journalists, the way councils interpret licensing legislation, renewed interest in cold calling from trading standards officers, and complaints, both the number and type of complaints being made (such as gaining entry to communal blocks of flats).

If we don’t recognise that things are changing gradually, then at some point, it will seem like we have reached a tipping point. We must accept that, prepare for it and learn from our experience of regulating street face-to-face fundraising.

One of the main issues is that the House-to-House Collections Act 1939 only allows councils to refuse a licence on the grounds of the unsuitability of the collector or because they think the returns going to charity are too low. But not to regulate how often, where or when fundraising takes place in their towns. And for charities with national exemption orders, councils have even fewer options. Just as with street fundraising, there is a gap between how councils want to regulate doorstep fundraising, and what the legislation allows them to do.

So there are two tasks for the charity sector.

The first is to work with councils to provide a solution to their issues around capacity: the PFRA has several ideas to close the regulatory gap that we will be bringing on stream over the next year. We can base this on our experience of allocating street fundraising opportunities and running diaries, although it will not be a carbon copy of our street processes.

The second task is to manage public perception. Ten years ago, the sector launched such robust defences of street fundraising that often we didn’t listen to what our opponents were saying about us. As a result, not only did we fail to engage with their objections, we often didn’t even acknowledge they had valid objections.

So we must accept that, like street, some people simply do not like to be asked. Some folk do not like doorstep. So do not duck or deny objections raised. Acknowledge complaints are rising and be committed to dealing with them. They may be relatively small, they may be dealt with without Fundraising Standards Board adjudication, but spending time and energy denying them or vociferously challenging them will be a Pyrrhic victory and make us look as if we don’t care.

With street, we waited for capacity to reach breaking point before we reacted to council’s desperate requests to sort it out. This time round, we must be ahead of the curve. Don’t wait for it to rise up and bite us. Act now. This is what the PFRA will be doing as we try to close the regulatory gap.

PFRA stopped actively defending and championing street F2F a couple of years ago to focus on being a regulator rather than a ‘trade association’.

Our view is that the best advocacy we can provide for F2F is good regulation.

Speaking at the Local Government Association conference this year – in the context of the failings of some local government – Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the RSA, said that the “best form of advocacy is self-improvement”. So what charities can also learn from street is the need to improve standards, and not just because the FRSB or the PFRA or the government is poking them with a big stick.

If we, the PFRA, provide first-class regulation, and charities provide first-class professional standards, councils will allow us to close the regulatory gap. If we do it well, licensing issues designed to address capacity and access will melt away.

Sally de la Bedoyere is chief executive at the PFRA