Raising money by soliciting pedestrians has become a despised profession in Britain, where street solicitors are known as “chuggers” or charity muggers.
Now, in a new video, The Guardian‘s entertainment editor, Paul MacInnes, poses as a street fund raiser and asks passersby to tell him: Why do people hate chuggers?
Wearing a bright yellow vest and holding a clipboard, Mr. MacInnes finds that he cannot get anyone to talk to him, much less donate money. Only after stashing the vest and clipboard does he begin to find people who wil talk.
One man, for example, tells Mr. MacInnes that most chuggers are “mercenaries.” He says that they have been known to grab hold of people and even pull earphones out of pedestrians’ ears in order to make their pitches. He also describes one chugger trying to raise money to fight a deadly disease who told a mother who was unwilling to give that he hoped her child never suffers from the disease.
Only one pedestrian interviewed by Mr. MacInnes said that she did not mind being solicited on the street–as long as it is for a good cause.
The journalist’s conclusion: Street fund raisers are dogged by public disgust, and the British government has wanted to crack down on them, but they probably don’t deserve the bad reputation they have.
Do you agree?
0 Responses to Street Solicitors Get No Respect
epourchot - February 3, 2010 at 4:17 pm
I think street solicitors, like phone solicitors, put many of us in a very uncomfortable position. If we open a mail solicitation, we are able to react honestly – with interest or not. Face to face, or on the phone, we still have that reaction, but often feel constrained by politeness to not (figuratively) drop the appeal into the waste basket. I feel like a bad person if I hang up on a phone solicitor or brush past a street solicitor – not because I didn’t support the cause (I often don’t wait long enough to even know what the cause is), but because I am being rude to another human being. It is natural to blame the solicitor for putting me in that position. Rather than accosting people on the street, perhaps solicitors should do or display something that allows passers-by to choose to enter into a dialogue or engagement. I don’t think I’ve ever been offended by a street musician, for example — even some whose abilities were truly awful. In the fundraising world, a good example might be the Salvation Army bell ringers who give us plenty of advance notice of who they are and what they are asking for, which allows us to decide whether to engage with them or not.