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

The battle of the floppy phallus

Society Diary is continually grateful to the good people of the world for dreaming up new and silly ideas to raise awareness for charitable causes. This time, it’s a campaign to raise awareness for sexually transmitted infections and HIV organisations. Its tool: the humble dildo.

Picture this. In the heart of New York City, huge numbers of people gathered together, ready to batter one another with wobbly rubber wangs, all in the name of charity. Well, you don’t need to picture it, to be honest. Here’s a long video picturing it for you in exhaustive detail. Diary is confident that few sillier things have been done in a good cause.

The red squirrel is a red herring

To change the subject completely, it seems the demise of Kids Company has brought various bombasts out of the woodwork with strongly held but poorly justified opinions about charities.

Charities don’t deserve tax breaks or government grants, it appears. They should be subject to FoI requests. They should be forced to merge until only one remains. And they should be forced to explain why they insist on paying their employees with money, instead of allowing them to exist merely on the heady ambrosia of goodwill.

Here’s Michael White in the Guardian. And here's Merryn Somerset Webb in the Financial Times.

It is difficult to grasp why, if all of the proposals in these two articles were implemented, anyone would ever want to set up a charity at all. The essential message appears to be that good-hearted people should create organisations to help others, should receive no financial benefit from it, but should allow themselves to be hectored freely by journalists and anyone else who comes by.

Anyway, that’s by the by. What’s really got Diary interested is one thing that all these individuals have in common. Bizarrely, they are really worried about the number of charities looking after the red squirrel.

Here’s White:

We might also consider how Britain’s well-meaning but ramshackle charity laws should usefully be reformed, both to make charities more effective and more focused on services that justify the heavy taxpayer subsidy they enjoy.

Multiple mergers of tiny bodies that duplicate each other’s services, real or vestigial, would be a good start. Next would be a cull of charities that should not enjoy such a status. You might want to start with a few animal charities – why do we need six to protect the red squirrel?

And here’s Somerset Webb:

If you want the detail of the inadequacies of the sector you might want to read David Craig’s The Great Charity Scandal. There are, he says, three key problems. The first is duplication and inefficiency — why does to the UK need six charities devoted to the wellbeing of the red squirrel.

Diary was curious about this appalling waste of resource dedicated to squirrels, so it popped along to the Charity Commission website, and found that – horror of horrors – there are actually seven charities dedicated to preserving the red squirrel. Things are even worse than we feared.

Little matter that one is based in the Isle of Wight, while another is based in Penrith. Why should that make a difference? Why, if you want to do the same thing in two geographically remote places, would you need to set up two different organisations to do so?

Surely we can apply the same logic to commercial organisations. There is already a barber’s in Kathmandu, so why do we also need one in Clapham? And there is already a cinema in Seoul. Why should we also have one in Stevenage?

Fat shamer gets shamed

So earlier this week, while the good folk of New York were getting beaten around the head with an ersatz todger, one poor journalist was getting smacked around the head with tweets after sending an admittedly rather over-specific request for help through the website AskCharity.

AskCharity allows journalists to ask charities for help finding case studies, and Diary can thoroughly recommend AskCharity, by the way, if there are any journalists reading. Anyway, here’s the original message, in all its prejudiced glory.

And, here’s how Twitter reacted. Not that you couldn’t have guessed.

Good-looking folk raise more money for charity

Sticking with the theme of vanity over human appearance, here’s some news from the British Heart Foundation. They’ve done some research, and found you’re more likely to get sponsorship for a charity challenge if you’re good-looking.

It transpires that 29 per cent of men admit they are more likely to sponsor someone if they find them attractive.

At first glance, this seems to summon up the usual questions about ursine defecation and Pontifical religious conviction. But then Diary started thinking. Only 29 per cent? Are the other 71 per cent of men really made of such honest stuff that they don’t let attractiveness influence their decisions?

Diary suspects that the other 71 per cent fall into three categories. First, those mean buggers who are unlikely to sponsor anyone for any reason (a fairly large group). Second, the kind of honest souls who really aren’t driven by physical attractiveness (a very small group). And the third and by far the largest group: liars.

Ursine homelessness problems solved

On a wholly unconnected note, we bring you the news that train company First Great Western currently has more than 40 homeless teddy bears in its lost property, and cannot find anyone to love them.

The company launched a campaign to reunite teddies lost on its trains with their owners last November. It’s a story to bring a tear to the eyes of the most hard-hearted hack, for not a single toy has found its way back to its owner.

Fear not, though. The company now plans to wash them and deliver them to a children’s charity where these sad sacks of soft stuffing will find happy new homes.