After staying out of the face-to-face fundraising market for a while, Mencap returned to the street late last year. With internal buy-in to secure and fundraisers to motivate during some of the worst snow-storms in memory, Michael Naidu explains how the charity pulled off a really rather successful campaign.

In 2009, Mencap looked into the valley of death and saw a bleak future. With an ageing donor base and declining individual donations, the need for a new generation of supporters was clear. This was made possible by developing a systematic approach to projecting income and expenditure over a five-year period. Do we need 1,000 or 10,000 new donors? The only way to answer that question is “How much money do you need and what will you spend it on?” Budgeting in a vacuum has limited relevance.