Secrets of firms whose staff stop you in street

REAL FUNDRAISING

Set up in 2009 by two ex-doorstep fundraisers and a chugger, the firm’s stated aim is to ‘change the world’.

It targets wealthy long-term donors using profiling techniques based on postcodes and claims to have signed up more than 90,000 people to almost 40 charities, including the RSPCA, Action Aid and Cancer Research UK.

Its chuggers, who move from city to city each week, have to sign up three donors a day to win a slice of ‘the best bonus scheme in the industry’. The most successful win trips abroad to destinations including Goa, Amsterdam and Geneva. Its staff are banned ‘on ethical grounds’ from using certain companies’ products in work time, including those of KFC, Nestle and Coca-Cola.

URBANLEAF LTD

Director Mark Nesbitt, 41, and his business partner Tom Lebor, 40, founded Urban Leaf in 2009 after ‘realising they could run a fundraising agency better than their boss’. The firm says it specialises in longterm donors and ‘quality over quantity’. Company records show the two bosses paid themselves £25,000 each in dividends last year. Fundraisers are paid a hefty £12-£16 per hour and the firm says on its website that charities ‘will always need money to do what they do and so people like us will need to get it for them’.

ONE SIXTY FUNDRAISING

Set up in 2014 by law graduate Matt Monfared, 31, and his business partner Matthew Atkinson, 37, One Sixty is currently being paid £1.3million for a Unicef campaign and more than £500,000 by humanitarian charity Plan International.

Mr Monfared is an ex-street fundraiser for homeless charity Shelter in Birmingham, where he claims to have managed the most successful team in Britain. He went on to manage the charity’s street fundraising in the south of England.

Companies House records show he and Mr Atkinson last year created another company called Maven Fundraising.