Our weekly round-up of outlandish and interesting information collected from the corners of the charity sector.
#WhoInventedGivingTuesday
Diary, in common with Superman, has a journalist as its mild-mannered alter ego, and this Wednesday that secret identity attended the #GivingTuesday summit.
#GivingTuesday, on the extremely unlikely off-chance that you missed it, is the day after the two big shopping days of Black Friday and Cyber Monday; those days follow on immediately after the public holiday of Thanksgiving, which obviously we don’t have here, but no matter: our retailers have decided that we can have the rampant consumerism without bothering to thank anyone for anything first, and have started offering mega-discounts on waffle irons (another pointless imported thing which is already big in America) and generally inciting people to tramp miles down shopping aisles in search of bargains.
So the idea of #GivingTuesday is that we then move on to all being nice to one another.
It’s good for the soul, not bad for the soles, as it were.
Anyway, you probably knew all that, because #GivingTuesday was pretty much plastered all over the face of the sector, like the work of a particularly inveterate billposter.
But despite last year’s success, the Charities Aid Foundation, which brought it to the UK from the US, has desires on making it bigger and better, and called this summit so we could all sit around and work out how to do that. It was called #MoreGivingTuesdayWednesday.
Well, it wasn’t, but it should have been.
CAF kicked things off, as you do, with an inspiring speech by the guy who dreamed up the whole fandango.
#GivingTuesday is one of those new-fangled American ideas, and its putative founder is the executive director of 92nd Street Y, a quintessentially American-sounding charity. So when he stood up and opened his mouth, Diary was slightly disappointed that he turned out to be a posh English bloke, Henry Timms.
How, an audience member demanded, had Timms managed to create something so special?
Timms mumbled for a while about how it had begun with a conversation about the nature of Black Friday, and went on to mumble – in an earnest-and-inspiring-but-slightly-bumbling way that suggested he might have gone to the same school as Hugh Grant – about the importance of it being collaborative and additive and a moral counterpoint, before eventually getting to the nub of the story.
“Actually, my wife thought of it,” he said.
Dog days not sick days
So the charity Blue Cross has conducted a survey of GPs and other health professionals and discovered that if we all kept pets in the workplace we would be less stressed and take less time off sick. Although it neglects to mention whether having your hamster eating the contents of your in-tray also makes you more productive.
Anyway, Blue Cross is calling on offices up and down the land to allow employees to bring their pets to work.
You can read it here, together with a bunch of fake quotes from dogs and a handful of pictures of our faithful hounds sitting in office chairs looking a bit perplexed.
Altogether, it’s the sort of thing that gets Diary hot under the collar.
Bring back Clarkson
So we hear a lot about the power of the new not-for-profit campaigning organisations – 38 Degrees, Avaaz, Change.org, and so on – and the last of the these recently scored a boost with its biggest campaign to date.
Sadly, it’s a petition for the BBC to bring back Jeremy Clarkson – the Top Gear presenter suspended for punching a producer because he hadn’t got his tea.
The petition has already been signed by goodness knows how many people (probably 800,000 by the time you read this) and was started by political blogger Paul Staines, better known as Guido Fawkes – one of those blokes who exists to make life easy for you, because you can comfortably think the opposite and know you’re almost certainly right.
Anyway, it’s not quite what Change.org had in mind, you suspect, but that’s the will of the people, so there we go.
Still, it’s not all bad news. Change.org says there are apparently 37 petitions circulating calling for Clarkson to be reinstated. But there are 64 calling on the BBC to kick him out.
SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER.
The charity sector is just one of the many corners of society made poorer by the far-too-early loss of fantasy author Sir Terry Pratchett, who supported many organisations, first and foremost Alzheimer’s Research UK, but also, in death, Rice, the Research Institute for the Care of Older People.
Such was his effectiveness as a charity campaigner that more than one chief exec has been heard to remark “I wish Sir Terry Pratchett had [insert condition here] instead.”
Having witnessed Diary’s attempts to be funny above, you may understand the awe in which this column holds a man who was really good at it.
