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

At least he’ll have no trouble eating prison food

Diary despairs sometimes at the readers of Civil Society News. Despite all sorts of serious stuff going wrong, one of our top stories this week is about a charity trustee who nicked a load of cash and spent it on dental treatments.

Still, it’s a simple tale of right and wrong. He stole charitable cash, he spent it on some new teeth, he got caught, and he got jailed.

Evidently you prefer a story where the molar is perfectly clear.

And it’s not all bad for the bloke who went down. He didn’t choose well. But at least he can chew swell. And you can’t accuse him of not putting his money where his mouth is.

Save the Children again

So Save the Children, as reported previously, is in loads of trouble with its own staff because it gave an anti-poverty award to Tony Blair, and the staff felt this was deeply inappropriate. Not just the staff, mind you, but somewhere around 120,000 other people.

This week, an email went out from the chief executive asking the staff to stop complaining about Tony Blair because it was causing trouble for the management, and also to stop leaking emails. It didn’t really apologise or suggest the management would do anything about the award to Blair.

The email was promptly leaked.

Diary feels that the leaders of Save the Children have missed the point. You can imagine the reaction in the charity’s offices up and down the land.

Sorry? You want us to shut up because it’s bad news for you. But you don’t want to do anything about what made us upset in the first place? Why of course. We’ll shut up at once. Why wouldn’t we?

The point being, of course, that management in many organisations have a habit of forgetting that’s what good news for them is not necessarily good news for the staff, and vice versa.

Diary would like to illustrate this through the medium of a rather good joke it once heard, in which a conversation between a patient and a doctor goes thus:

“There’s good news and bad news.”

“What’s the bad news?”

“We’ve had to amputate your leg.”

“What’s the good news?”

"You see that blonde nurse over there? The really good-looking one.”

“Yes."

“I’ve got a date with her.”

'Should I be rude to chuggers?'

So Diary is written by hacks, and hacks are required to be cynical. It’s in the person specification – “must be cynical” – just below “good shorthand 100 words per minute” and just above “must have ability to hyphenate correctly”.

Which means that Diary’s default opinion on this week’s Giving Tuesday was that it was a load of pony and would never work.

Reluctantly we’ve been forced to admit that it does seem to have raised some money – although there are still mutterings about “displacement” in the more statistically minded corners of the office – but more importantly, it’s also got people talking about charity.

To whit, a rather entertaining and also eminently sensible column about good practice when giving to charity in the Guardian. It’s well worth reading, but in particular, Diary would like to share this particular gem about what you have to do before you’re allowed to be rude to face-to-face fundraisers:

“Most of us cringe every time we’re accosted by a shiny, happy young person on the street asking us if we have two minutes to spare for orphans, sick animals or the planet. They may give charities a bad name, but they are only ubiquitous because most of us won’t regularly donate until we’re gently guilt-tripped into it. So here’s the deal. In the privacy of your own home, set up a direct debit to the charity of your choice for as much as you think you should give, then a bit more. Then tell the chuggers to go away. When enough of us have done that, they will."