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

An undercover boss and secret fundraising totals 

So Mark Goldring, boss of Oxfam, was on TV show Undercover Boss earlier this week, pretending to be an Oxfam volunteer. He discovered that his charity was doing great work, etc, and that it was important to say thank you and particularly to be more open.

He may also have learned it was important to place a TV ad asking for money for your charity in the middle of the show about your charity. It’s not reported, but Oxfam definitely did place a TV ad asking for cash, and apparently it raised a packet.

A Civil Society News scribe put in a quick call to the charity to ask them how big a packet, and it gave us some figures.

Then, shortly afterwards, an Oxfam press officer rang up and attempted to, um, ungive the figures, explaining that apparently individual appeal totals don't mean much without context.

So this is Oxfam being more open. Goodness knows what they would have said before.

Diary was heartened to see Unicef proudly shouting their fundraising totals from the roof tops after raising £3.1m from the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony. 

Bigot bingo

Diary is always amazed by the people who proudly proclaim in the comments underneath any article about charities that they no longer give because they, in their immense wisdom and knowledge about the sector, have decided that none of Britain’s 400,000 charities are capable of spending money properly.

Yep, well done you. Spend it on a big telly or a curry instead, that’ll definitely make the world a better place.

So Diary was pleased, during the process of reading the Twitter comments about Goldring’s appearance, to come across a game we’ll call Charity Comment Bigot Bingo:

Basically, you and a couple of mates all pick any ten of the comments, and the first person to tick them off wins. Shouldn’t take long if you read the Daily Mail.

Man starts anti-poverty charity, cures his own

Well done to William Rapfogel, who ran the American charity Metropolitan New York Council on Jewish Poverty for more than two decades. Rapfogel recently accepted a plea bargain which will see him serve three to ten years, after it was discovered he’d manipulated insurance payments to make around $3m at his charity’s expense, thereby ensuring at least one person left poverty for good. (Although he was already earning $400,000 a year, so he was probably okay before he nicked the cash.)

In any case, it certainly puts chief executive pay in the UK in some kind of perspective.

Idle thumbs

Nick Hurd, former minister for civil society and longtime staple of these pages, may have found himself at a bit of a loose end following his departurue from his job. He’s launched a spate of invective against HS2, for one thing – the high-speed rail link his constituents are so peeved about – and he’s also rekindled his love affair with Twitter, which he’s recently used about once a week to announce some official policy, but which he was previously a medium to heavy user of.

Perhaps it’s no surprise – it’s a medium which is almost designed to make work for idle thumbs.

Hurd’s latest opuses* read as follows:

“Thank you to stranger on tube who gave me his paper having written on it ‘Thank you for what you did for sector as Minister’. Good of you."

He added: "I believe everything happens for a reason" #hopeyouarerightmate

One might almost suggest, having read that, that Hurd is a trifle disgruntled.

In any case, Diary remains waiting with bated breath for the first public utterances of Brooks Newmark, Hurd’s successor. While others are concerning themselves with the quotidian details of his policies, Diary is concerned about a much weightier and loftier matter: is Newmark funny?

*The plural of opus is actually opera, Diary has just discovered. But we’ll stick with opuses for now, since nobody much knows that.