Humbug!

Oh no, surely we’re not talking about Christmas in February! Well, we are, but please read on before you close this page in disgust.

I’m one of those people who like to defer having anything to do with Christmas until December. The endless marketing makes a mess of autumn (and advent, if Christmas has religious significance for you) and drives most of us up the wall. Many of us would cheerfully ban tinsel and 1970s Christmas pop from shopping centres until much closer to the festive season.

So I feel a bit of a hypocrite uploading Christmas card designs to our website when there are still ten months to go.

The reality for a charity – like many shops – is that we have to plan far in advance. Christmas card sales start with our September newsletter and various autumn events, where people expect to be able to buy what they need for Christmas. We therefore have to take delivery of our cards in the summer, and this demands a planning process much earlier in the year.

Anyway, enough of the excuses – this is where you come in. Please. We are asking supporters to help us choose our card designs this year from a shortlist of twenty. If you could go to our online poll and vote for three cards, it would really help us identify what is likely to be popular and sell well. The name of the game, after all, is raising as much as we can for research.

It’s all in a good cause, and such an easy way to do a little something to fight dementia right now.

If it helps, you can mutter “bah, humbug!” as you vote.

A good example

People sometimes ask me what "adopting a charity" or having a charity of the year actually means. I usually start my reply by explaining that there isn’t a one size fits all approach to this. To continue the sartorial image, the arrangement should be tailored to fit the supporting organisation.

What I mean by this is that the fundraising activity should fit with the work of the organisation and not get in the way. The aim is to support the work of the charity, but it should always be a good experience for the charity’s partner as well. It might surprise some that organisations which support a charity in this way generally benefit from the arrangement, both in terms of reputation and staff morale/relationships.

Last year, we had an excellent partnership with IOP Publishing, who took us on as their charity of the year and raised well over £6,000, exceeding even their own ambitions. They were great for us to work with because they clearly enjoyed what they were doing for us and took a real sense of achievement from it.

IOP Publishing’s PR Officer, Alison Hadley, and I produced a short case study, setting out what they did and how we both benefitted. You can read here how both BRACE and IOP Publishing saw the arrangement and how it helped us both.

I hope this will inspire a few others!

A small sign of growing awareness

Watching ITV’s drama Lewis last night, I was surprised when discussion of dementia research cropped up.

This was part 1 of an episode called Intelligent Design. One of the fictional Oxford academics in the story was a scientist who was introduced as having contributed to dementia research. Inspector Lewis asked her about her work on Alzheimer’s, whereupon she widened the definition to include other dementias and started to explain the amyloid hypothesis. Of course, that didn’t last very long – the viewers were signed up for a police drama and didn’t want a long explanation of the chemistry of the brain and different theories about the causes of dementia. It was, however, a strangely heartening moment, another small sign that discussion of dementia is becoming mainstream. It doesn’t matter if most of us don’t know what the amyloid hypothesis is, the important thing is that we can talk about dementia.

By coincidence, the programme’s star, Kevin Whately, is an ambassador of the Alzheimer’s Society.