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

Fundraising: a defence against the dark arts

There’s a new gloriously pointless quiz on the internet: which fundraising Harry Potter character are you?

(Hat tip to Ian MacQuillin, director of fundraising think tank Rogare and evidently a consummately skilled time waster, for pointing this out.)

Anyway, you just have to answer an increasingly ludicrous bunch of questions and it spits out an answer: you’re Dumbledore the consultant, or something.

The press, public and our political elite obviously think the most common answer should be Voldemort, based on the coverage of the Olive Cooke case in the last couple of weeks, but this doesn’t appear to be an option. Perhaps an oversight?

So Diary did the quiz, obviously, And what did it end up as?

Naturally it was Rita Skeeter, the crack investigative journalist.

Charity operates on orang-utan

Nuffield Health, a private health charity, has claimed a new record: the first double surgery on an orang-utan in the UK.

There weren’t too many other people in the running for this, so far as Diary is aware, but well done, nonetheless.

Just to clarify, this wasn’t some bizarre medical experiment. There was just an orang-utan which was feeling poorly – her name was Vicky, and she had chronic sinusitis and air sacculitis, since you ask – and Nuffield Health decided to help out.

Nuffield Health issued this statement to explain what happened: “Consultant ENT surgeon, Jawed Tahery from Nuffield Health, The Grosvenor Hospital in Chester, carried out functional endoscopic sinus surgery and zoo vets Karen Archer and Andrew Moore from Oakhill Veterinary Centre in Preston performed marsupialisation of the air sac.”

Jolly good. Diary is none the wiser, but well done, anyway.
You get the impression that Jawed Tahery thought the whole thing was rather cool, actually. Orang-utans, he said, are basically like humans but with harder bones and no ethmoid sinuses, whatever they are, and therefore a bit of a novel challenge.

Orang-utans are, incidentally, one of Diary’s favourite animals, not least because of the description of them by one Terry Pratchett, perhaps the only author to make an orang-utan one of the central characters in more than 40 novels.

Pratchett went off to Borneo in 1995 to look at them in the wild for a documentary, and from memory described them something like this: “A female orang-utan looks like an orange sack, and a male looks like an orange sack stuffed a bit too full of footballs. But don’t worry. He only wants to do three things, and he doesn’t want to do any of them with you.”

Boobs work well for fundraising. Who knew?

So the familiar story rears its head again. If you want to persuade people to part with money, pictures of boobs are the best way to do it. This time the individual concerned is Tracy Kiss, a former glamour model who is offering to share topless snaps of herself in exchange for donations of at least £10 to a charity of her choice.

This unusual tactic got her kicked off at least two websites, including GoFundMe, but since then any number of news publications, including Playboy, perhaps unsurprisingly, have taken up her cause, and today the mirror reports that a bloke who inherited some cash has got in touch, and given her £200,000.

So far it looks like cash is on its way to disability charity WheelPower, The Fire Fighters Charity and Stoke Mandeville Hospital. But apparently another 200 charities are now in line for a donation.

This is a family publication, but if you want to learn more about Miss Kiss in all her fundraising, er, glory, you can find her here.

Periscope

On a final note, Diary hears charities are increasingly going to be using a new app-type thingumy called Periscope.

Who knows what it's for, but it does seem to be coming up increasingly often, including in this week's Social Charity Spy which apparently has a slightly more detailed explaination of how the app works.