Our weekly round-up of interesting and outlandish information, collected from the corners of the charity sector.
Daddy, there’s a dead squirrel on the trampoline
So, the new John Lewis ad. Probably, since it’s raising money for charity and it’s heartwarming and life-affirming and all that stuff, Diary shouldn’t be a scrooge. But sorry, we can’t choose our nature, and scrooge is all Diary’s really got to offer.
And this ad. When all’s said and done, it’s a bit odd. Would you want to go out on Christmas Day and discover that a pair of foxes and a badger had spent the night enjoying themselves on your brand new garden trampoline? I mean, well, what do we think they were doing on that trampoline?
Look, tell you what, we’ll leave it to the imagination what those foxes got up to. I’m pretty sure they ate that squirrel, though. And the hedgehog.
Also, the dog playing Buster the Boxer is, in Diary’s opinion, a bit wooden as an actor.
Plus, think about the kid in this scenario. She goes out, ready to enjoy her new present, and she can't, because there's a bloody dog bouncing up and down on it.
Anyone with experience of fatherhood has probably already spent hours constructing some new toy for their child, only to experience some footling objection which means this is not, in some way or other, up to your daughter’s exacting specifications. Those gentlemen, like Diary, will have identified how their little darling would react in this scenario. Two seconds after the end of this advert, you know the next sound you’d hear.
“Waaaahh! Daaaddy! The dog is playing on the trampoline. Waaaah!”
Yeah, Buster, the rest of the day is not going to go well for you, boy. You are, as the proverb has it, in the doghouse. Although the dad may go easy on you because he is thinking hard about whether he really needs to mend the fence to prevent his garden becoming infested with foxes. And conceivably, whether those foxes might have been carriers of tuberculosis.
Finally, can Diary just ask a question? How much cash are the Wildlife Trusts really getting out of this ad anyway? Diary is also bit suspicious about this, because John Lewis has never really revealed how much it’s given in previous years, and neither has anyone else.
So, turns out things cost money
If you’re a right wing newspaper, and not much inclined to think terribly hard, it’s easy to see why you could get annoyed about how charities received “only a third” of the money raised from 888,000 ceramic poppies erected outside the Tower of London to mark the anniversary of the start of World War One.
First, let’s try some remedial maths. Of the money people paid for their poppies, 41 per cent went to charity. This is 8 per cent more than a third, which is 33 per cent; 41 per cent is also known as “more than two fifths”. Or perhaps, if you were writing about something you approved of, you could go with “almost half”.
Second, given that the papers read the accounts (at least The Times did; dunno about The Sun or the Daily Mail) it’s not clear what they felt should have happened to the other 59 per cent. It was pretty clear that this had been spent on a couple of fairly key things:
- Making poppies.
- Transporting poppies to the Tower of London.
- Erecting all those poppies.
- Taking them down again.
- Sending them to 888,000 people
Yeah, we know, some of it was done by volunteers, but it's still not bloody cheap.
It’s not like with a standard donation, where you expect overheads to be pretty low because you hand over money and in exchange you get, er, nothing at all. This time, you pay £25 and you get a unique ceramic poppy.
Granted, there was an investor and he made a million quid. But if the poppies hadn’t sold, he’d have lost a million quid. So Diary finds it hard to weep too much. Artist Paul Cummins broke even and forewent a potential £6.2m profit, which doesn’t sound too money-grabbing.
The Sunday Times, which broke the story, removed it shortly afterwards. But you can read from the comments underneath that the paper hasn’t scored a sure-fire hit with this bit of faux outrage.
“All seems perfectly reasonable,” said one – fairly typical – commentator. “It doesn't actually matter if people made a profit. What is Paul Cummins supposed to live on? Thin air?”
Admittedly, the slavering green pen brigade under the Daily Mail story tried a bit harder, but you can feel even their heart wasn’t in it. Most of them didn’t seem to have read the story and were complaining about the pay of the charity’s chief executive. Having failed, presumably, to identify that the company involved didn’t have one.
Donald Trump
Like everyone else in England, Diary thinks Donald Trump is an almighty dickhead. It’s hard to begin to explain how much Diary dislikes the man.
And yet, there are two tiny silver linings. First, we are no longer part of the voting populace to have done the stupidest thing in recent memory. And second, Trump is extremely easy to make fun of. His charity – one of the most corrupt institutions in the history of the US – must surely be ripe for an exposé or two. It’s fair to say the newspapers will be subjecting him to some scrutiny. So Diary will get a few columns out of his arrival.
So welcome, Donald. Try not to do anything very much, or to break Planet Earth while you’re in power. Try not to grab anyone else by the, well, you know. And in four years time, try not to let the door hit you on the way out.
One for all the single ladies
It’s fair to say that Karl Wilding, director of public policy and volunteering at NCVO, is not often compared to Beyoncé. The physical resemblance is, shall we say, slight. But he does give good presentations about the charity sector. He speaks a lot of sense, and usually agrees with what Diary has to say. So perhaps the below is not total hyperbole.
Watching @karlwilding at a conference is like watching Beyoncé live at the VMAs. An artist at the height of his game. #locality16
— Gen Maitland Hudson (@My_impact_is) November 8, 2016
On the other hand, come to think of it, perhaps it is.
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