Our weekly round-up of interesting and outlandish information, collected from the corners of the charity sector.

If you have to bring a dog, make it dog-shaped

So it’s 'Bring your dog to work day' today. You’ll have noticed this already if you’ve read Diary’s sister column, Social Charity Spy, which has frankly gone, er, well, a bit barking over the idea.

So far, so good. Canine awareness. Charitable endeavour. All excellent.

What’s really got Diary’s goat about this story, though, if you’ll pardon the shift from canine to caprine, is all the people turning up at work with little yapper-type dogs in handbags.

Let’s just get this clear. It’s not acceptable to take something that basically still kinda thinks it’s a wolf, and imprison it in the body of a large rat.

Dogs should be dog-shaped and dog-sized, so that they can actually behave in proper dog ways. This involves running about a lot and barking and tracking things by scent, and very little pootling around the office and investigating ankles and looking cute and adorable. Almost none, in fact.

Bring your work to dog day

So that’s that. While we’re on the subject, though, Diary would like to propose a new fundraising idea: 'Bring your work to dog day'.

This is a unique new service in which schoolboys could make a donation to charity in exchange for having that charity’s dog actually eat their homework, together with photographic evidence, in order to provide a foolproof excuse when they arrive at class the next morning.

Save the place for Save the Children

So Save the Children is in a bit of bother with the Daily Mail and others over the way it went about selling old clothes donated by Victoria Beckham because they no longer fit her three-year-old daughter Harper.

The gear was on sale in one of its charity shops, and the charity had, apparently, sent a few of its volunteers down to queue outside, complete with a script about how wonderful saving children really is, just in case the sale didn’t look busy enough when the snappers turned up. Which they duly did, because of course the national news agenda has nothing more important to focus on.

The whole farrago was already faintly ridiculous – a queue to buy the cast-off clothes of the daughter of someone who used sing (or play football), but now doesn’t – and this reduces it to the status of utter farce.

But it’s hard to blame the charities – the Beckhams are box-office (there was a full-page spread in one this morning about David Beckham and his son having a bacon sandwich together) and the publicity must be lovely, far more important than the sale of the clothes. So of course they want to look good in front of the cameras.

And to be honest, it’s probably an added bonus for Save the Chidren to get back in the papers with an article about cheating the papers the first time round.

From a waste of time to… a waste of time

Diary, being a column of relatively little brain, tends mostly to avoid the serious business of sector funding, as a matter rather beyond its limited bailiwick. But even Diary could hardly fail to notice that the process of establishing the Local Sustainability Fund has hardly gone swimmingly.

It was first mooted 15 months ago, which seems a rather long time to take to get ready to give money away, and has somehow lost half its cash in the intervening time. The application process seems to need a PhD in advanced fundraising to understand, and the cash you get at the end of the process is quite wiffly in comparison – £20,000 to £100,000 – although no doubt welcome by the chosen ones who get a few quid.

Also, you’ve only got about 24 minutes to apply before it closes again. The Office for Civil Society said, without apparent irony, that this is because it is “keen to get the programme rolling to get support to charities as soon as possible”. Yeah. So keen you took more than a year to open it.

In short, the Fund looks extraordinarily unlikely to sustain many locals, but it should successfully waste a fair few hours of charities’ time applying for it. Just what everybody was looking for.

She wuvs him

Does Caron Bradshaw, chief executive of the Charity Finance Group, find herself attracted to Will Greenwood, former centre of the England rugby team and host of our Charity Awards last week? Based on this tweet, it’s hard to tell. Perhaps this one will clear it up.

See-through loos

So onto a semi-serious issue. Hopefully the image on today’s Diary didn’t frighten you too much. It’s WaterAid’s new see-through toilet for Glastonbury, designed to remind you that some ridiculous number of people need to poo in the open, and that they don’t like it much. (To be honest, a lot of people at Glastonbury may prefer to poo in the open, but that’s a separate story.)

It’s one-way glass, by the way, so while you can look out, other people can’t look in. So the loo with a view is safe to use.