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

Most offensive charity adverts of 2014

There's been a bit of criticism of the Band Aid single, suggesting that its general message is unhelpful - to whit, that Africa is basically a rubbish place and while you should certainly give the starving diseased buggers who live there some money you should on no account actually visit.

But Society Diary is delighted to bring you news that it’s far from the worst offender of 2014. There’s actually a whole website dedicated to giving out awards for rubbish, patronising videos about poverty and Africa, and it doesn’t seem particularly short of entries.

They're called the Rusty Radiator Awards. The winner was from Feed a Child SA, which features a white woman feeding a black child “like a dog”. It's not great.

The awards themselves are named after a 2012 video in which a collection of Africans, fed up to the back teeth with patronising toss being spouted about them, decided to stage a spoof campaign to collect radiators and send them to Norway, because “frostbite kills too”.

There’s also a Golden Radiator award, which went to Save the Children for this video.

Don’t save the lesbians

Save the Children must be pretty happy to get some good press, because elsewhere, they keep getting a kicking. This week it was Sandi Toksvig, a former patron, who was given the boot from hosting their anniversary celebrations – in 1994, admittedly – because they did not want Princess Anne to meet a lesbian.

“I don’t know what they thought,” she said. “Save the children, apart from the gay ones!”

Greenpeace fails to respect the environment

So it’s fair to say the Nazca Lines of Peru are fairly important. The fragile 1,500-year-old carvings, so vast they can be seen properly only from the sky, are a sacred place. The world’s most important people – presidents and prime ministers and so on – have to seek special permission to visit, wear special footwear, and generally aren’t especially welcome.

So it’s probably a bit crass of Greenpeace to have pitched up there and unveiled a giant banner right next to the ancient carvings.

The Peruvians are livid, the individual campaigners are being prosecuted, and Greenpeace has been left apologising profusely to anyone who’ll listen. Nobody, meanwhile, can really remember what the campaigning group actually wanted to say.

Oops.

Rob Wilson puts the boot, well, somewhere…

Rob Wilson, the minister for civil society, seems to have a bit of an ambivalent feeling about his new brief. He’s already put the boot into the sector’s infrastructure bodies over their negativity and inability to get on, and he decided to do so again last week, at the Christmas reception of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Civil Society and Volunteering, which is organised by NCVO.

“This Christmas we had visits from the three wise men,” he told the assembled guests. “First we had Sir Stuart Etherington, and he brought... a review of the Charity Commission’s governance. Second we had Sir Stephen Bubb, and he brought... a review of the Charity Commission’s governance. And then… Well, there isn’t a third wise man.”

Where exactly he’s put the boot remains to be seen, though. In his mouth seems a distinct possibility, because presumably one tip for being a successful minister is not to display contempt for your most crucial contacts.

It’s fair to say there wasn’t universal acclaim among the charity delegates attending, with one saying that it was “the most godawful speech I’ve ever heard”.

Mind you, Wilson didn’t just confine himself to attacking his key contacts in the voluntary sector. He also had a go at his predecessor.

“If I make it through tomorrow,” he told the audience, “I’ll be the second longest-standing minister for civil society in this government.”

Not enough Daves

On a final aside, NCVO also carried out an analysis of speakers at its APPG and was pleased to find that there were slightly more female than male speakers. However it has therefore fallen down on a traditional metric in Parliamentary politics – the crucial Dave-o-meter.

Legend has it that David Cameron has had more fundraising dinners with his fellow Daves than women, and that Ukip has more Daves standing for it than women. It’s not quite clear this is absolutely true, but it’s certainly a close-run thing.

Anyway, this drew Diary’s attention to an interesting fact, which is that there just aren't many people working in the voluntary sector called Dave. Perhaps this is because most of the sector is made up of left-wing twentysomething women who eat lentils.