Our door-to-door fundraising

When you sign up to our Sponsor A Dog scheme with one of our door-to-door fundraisers, they will leave you with a leaflet naming the dog you have chosen. We also aim to send email confirmation of your donation, or your subscription for lottery players, within 24 hours.  

If you haven’t provided your bank details, you’ll receive a follow-up phone call from the same fundraiser requesting these, unless you’ve arranged otherwise with the fundraiser.  

As an added check, to make sure you had a good experience with our fundraiser, you may also receive a ‘welcome call’ a few days later thanking you for signing up and confirming your sponsorship details, so we can check that everything’s correct. 

You will then receive your welcome pack in the post with your dog’s information, or a lottery subscription confirmation, and confirmation of your first payment date.  

Our fundraisers will ask for an ongoing donation paid monthly via Direct Debit to either our Sponsor A Dog scheme, or our Lucky Pups Lotto. Direct Debit is the safest way for our fundraisers to set up regular gifts, protecting you and your money by means of the Direct Debit Guarantee.

We appreciate people wanting to donate in ways other than Direct Debit. Our fundraisers are unable to have collection tins, though, as these can cost us money and time to keep secure and take to the bank safely. If you are unable to donate by Direct Debit, please feel free to contact us on 020 7837 0006 and our customer services team will be happy to help you, or donate online here.

We receive no government funding and rely completely on supporter donations to care for around 14,000 dogs each year. Face-to-face fundraising is one of the most cost-effective methods of bringing new supporters to our cause and is our largest source of regular income.

Without this, we could not continue our work to help stray and abandoned dogs across the UK. 
 
Face-to-face fundraising also allows us to raise awareness of our work on a personal level.  We expect the highest standards from all our representatives and are committed to ensuring all our interactions with the public are friendly, positive and professional.  

If you feel you have experienced an interaction that was not up to our high standards, please email us or give us a call on 020 7837 0006. 
 
Dogs Trust is a member of the Chartered Institute of Fundraising and the Fundraising Regulator, and adheres to their D2D Code of Conduct. Under these guidelines, our fundraisers are allowed to carry out fundraising activities from 9am to 9pm on weekdays, and 10am to 9pm on Sundays.  

We work with the fundraising organisations Charity Link, Wesser and Excel Fundraising, who carry out all our door-to-door fundraising. We require all of our fundraisers to be paid a living wage salary, with small incentives for performance. We do not operate on commission. 
 
Currently, for every £1 we invest in fundraising we receive over £4 in return. The cost of all the fundraising is taken from our annual pre-allocated fundraising budget and as such, 100% of your donation is received by Dogs Trust directly, and the fundraising agency do not receive any of your donation.  

We take the security of our donors’ personal details extremely seriously. All the personal information you provide to our fundraisers is stored securely. We will never use your personal information without consent, and will never rent, swap or sell your data to other organisations. All our practices are compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). You can find out more by reading our privacy policy.