Our weekly round-up of outlandish and interesting information collected from the corners of the charity sector.
It’s a big bloke in a silly dress. Enough said.
Well done to Colin Plews, all six and a half feet and 19 stone of him, for launching the first charity calendar since naked vets holding confused sheep to tickle the funnybone of the jaundiced scribes of Civil Society News. It's essentially pictures of him, with a beard, in a rather fetching fishtail frock.
He's raising cash for Breast Cancer Campaign. He’s also running the London Marathon in the dress, which Diary wouldn’t fancy trying. You can find out more here. That's about it, really.
Whose poverty, exactly?
Save the Children are facing a bit of a backlash from staff over a decision to give former PM Tony Blair an award for his anti-poverty work. Hundreds of staff have signed a letter saying the award was "inappropriate and a betrayal to Save the Children’s founding principles and values", The Guardian has reported.
Comedian Dom Joly, an ambassador for the charity, also got stuck in. He tweeted that he was “pretty embarrassed” to be an ambassador for Save The Children “when they hand out awards to Tony Blair for his ‘anti-poverty’ work”.
“I can only assume they meant his own, personal poverty?” he added.
Just feed them some second-hand brains
Apropos of nothing very much, Diary found itself deep in conversation earlier this week with one of the doyens of fundraising thinking, who will for now remain nameless.
Anyway, your unidentified cogitator became embroiled in a discussion about whether zombies would make good street fundraisers.
After all, they are extremely persistent, rarely deterred by bad weather or a failure to make eye contact, and their conversion rate is excellent. Their retention rate is even better. And they don’t ask for much by way of pay.
Maybe it’s time, he posited, to launch the PZRA.
Sadly, our anonymous interlocutor later identified a flaw in the plan.
“They just wouldn’t be able to follow the three-step rule,” he said. “And they’d consistently fail to avoid shop doorways.”
Not us, obviously
The importance of gaining consent for your fundraising campaign was the main topic of discussion at a breakfast briefing last week on new EU data protection regulation, hosted by the marketing agency FastMap.
Consent is a big issue for consumers and donors, so charities needed to think hard about how to get it when collecting personal details, the audience heard.
In the Q&A that followed, an audience member pointed out that he’d just been given a feedback form which asked for his personal details, but hadn’t asked for his consent to use them.
Oops.
Things that are not mosques
So earlier this week, as many of you will already know, Ukip got upset with the Beeb for holding an event in front of a mosque. Except it wasn’t a mosque, it was Westminster Cathedral.
Twitter, unsurprisingly, loved it to bits, and set off with the hashtag #thingsthatarenotmosques. Mosque-asins, Mosque-ow, Mosque-itos. You get the idea. Plus, obviously, a bunch of things with domes. Kennington station. The Brighton Pavilion. Iced gems.
It’s a bit tangentially connected to Diary’s core readership. But after all, Westminster Cathedral is a charity, and it’s extremely funny, so we thought we’d tell you about it. And just to be helpful, here’s a picture of another charity that’s not a mosque.
