UrbanLeaf can live with the word "chugger"
Howard Lake | 29 August 2005 | News
“Chugger”, the pejorative term for a face-to-face street fundraiser, is now in the Oxford Dictionary of English, but street fundraising company UrbanLeaf is relaxed about the term.
Clive Hanks of UrbanLeaf admits that the face-to-face fundraising industry does not like the word “chugger”. It is of course disrespectful and based on popular misperceptions of the medium, how it operates and what it achieves.
But the word is here to stay, and there’s little that the industry can do about it at this stage. Clive thinks fundraisers will just have to live with it and demonstrate through their professionalism how unwarranted it is.
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“It would be great if the job face-to-face fundraisers do was seen as what it is; positive, effective and worthwhile. And it would be great if the fundraisers themselves were seen as dedicated, well-trained and compassionate people, rather than a nuisance out for their own financial gain.
“But I don’t think we should take ourselves too seriously and if thats what people call us, that’s what they call us. Face-to-face fundraisers come in for all sorts of abuse from all sorts of people every day, they always have and always rise above it. Being called a chugger is frustrating but no more than that really.”
Clive argues that there has been a steady improvement in professionlism as the industry has matured and also as it has become more regulated.
UrbanLeaf, whose clients include Scope, World Vision and UNICEF, says that it achieves very few public complaints, “often zero for an entire campaign.” It attributes this to the quality of the fundraisers it recruits.
Clive concludes: “so the whole “chugger” thing is probably something we’re stuck with – but hopefully it’s not a term used by the people who actually stop and see what face-to-face is really about.”
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About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.