doorknock

plural doorknocks

1. AustraliaNew ZealandA campaign of going from house to house knocking on doors, such as for a charity appeal.

   Sometimes they were raffles, mostly they were doorknocks. I went on one of the doorknocks after Wendy talked me into it.

   1981, Graham Jackson, Square Crib, page 98

   2 more examples

   To run a doorknock you need volunteer collectors — lots of them. But because there are so many doorknocks each year, collectors are overloaded and it is difficult to recruit new ones. So what is the answer?

   1995, John Montague Gurney, N. E. Renton, Successful Clubs, page 53

   […] mobile phone providers have sent text messages to Victorian customers warning them of the conditions, in what has been described as an "electronic doorknock".

   2009 March 2, Holly Ife with AAP, “CFA and DSE warn of fires threatening Victoria, deny exaggeration”, in Herald Sun, archived from the original on 06 Mar 2009

present singular third person doorknocks · participle present doorknocking · participle past doorknocked · past doorknocked

1. AustraliaNew ZealandTo participate in a campaign of going from house to house knocking on doors; to knock on the door (of a house) during such a campaign.

   1979, Fatma Dharamsi, et al., Harlesden Community Project, Community Work And Caring For Children: A Community Project In An Inner City Local Authority, page 440, During the doorknocking local residents had talked about other issues.

   2 more examples

   With some exceptions, doorknocking is likely to elicit a large number of small donations but relatively few large donations.

   2007, Philip Hughes, Alan Black, Peter Kaldor, Building Stronger Communities, page 156

   ‘He doorknocked thirty-two thousand houses,’ Thérèse says. ‘I doorknocked with him at weekends. That′s one way to get fit, especially when every house that I doorknocked was high-set, but I took the formal period of the campaign off.’

   2007, Robert Macklin, Kevin Rudd: The Biography, unnumbered page