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

Hugging dogs

Diary is a hard-hearted soul, little given to going “Aww!” But even its flint-like interior melted a little when faced with this picture of two dogs sharing a tender embrace when they learned that they were going to be put down if they weren’t rehomed.

Or at least, that’s how people interpreted it. It seems a bit implausible to Diary that the dogs were really hugging, or that they really understood the policies at their shelter.

But let’s not worry. It did the trick. The picture, originally posted by Angels Among Us Pet Rescue, a US charity, got shared a bazillion times on Facebook, and within two hours the two dogs had new homes.

I second that emojion

Let's stick with the animal theme for a bit, and report that earlier this week, one of the scribes of Civil Society News got in touch with WWF UK because we were curious about a fundraising campaign they launched earlier this year.

The campaign basically involved getting people to tweet about endangered animals using emojis. You know, the silly pictures of smiling faces you get sent in text messages by people too busy to type words.

It seems that Twitter went absolutely wild for this idea, and thousands of people with time on their hands and a love of cute images sent messages to one another. The WWF emojis got shared 580,000 times, apparently.

But the second half of the campaign was that after folk had used these new emojis, they were supposed to donate for the privilege. And sadly, no one at WWF seems much inclined to let us know whether anyone did. *

It’s clear to Diary what's happened: WWF, being largely English in origin, are suffering from a modern, digital form of repression. They don’t like to talk about their emojis.

Diary feels a bit false talking about all this stuff, because it’s fair to say this column is not a digital native. More an analogue native, to be honest. Diary still thinks videotape is a pretty cool idea.

When Diary turns up in its boat to Digital Island, like a bemused anthropologist with a big beard, wearing socks with its sandals, the digital natives all come out and throw spears at it with selfie sticks, or something.

Anyway, it’s a bit of a shame WWF wouldn’t hand out the info, meaning we can’t write a story about how cool their campaign was.

Perhaps how we feel about this can best be summed up by our digital reporter, who spake thus:

It just didn’t fly

Still with our furred and feathered friends, it appears that charities minister Rob Wilson caused a bit of trouble this week.

Wilson said in an interview that he’d been told by constituents and members of the public that the RSPCA and the RSPB didn’t do much conservation. The public, he said, were worried the two bodies campaigned too much.

The RSPB promptly lost its reserve, as it were. It got in a bit of a flap, and completely flew off the handle.

“We do ruffle a few feathers,” they declared proudly, and went on to point out that they’ve got loads and loads and loads and loads of members, who might conceivably be more representative of the public than some bloke Wilson met out on the campaign trail. Reports that it was a bloke down the pub have not been substantiated.

Diary was interested to see how quickly and positively the charity responded. It’s almost as if they knew there was something like this waiting in the wings.

We couldn’t afford it

It wasn’t a good week for Wilson in general, actually. He made it onto the front page of Metro when the news broke that he’d claimed 9p in expenses for a journey to visit one of his constituents – 350 yards in a car, apparently.

As it happens, one of our staffers lives in Reading and Society Diary asked whether he’d be pop round the corner and buttonhole Wilson about the story.

Of course, came the reply, but only if Diary was willing to pay expenses.

Fourpence, apparently.

 

* Diary suspects they didn’t.