A little extra help

When people volunteer to help a charity, they might imagine themselves standing behind a sales table, doing something mad for sponsorship or stuffing newsletters into envelopes.

A lot of volunteering for BRACE is done, not in the BRACE office or at the charity’s own events, but within groups to which the volunteer already belongs. This could mean a business, school, college or church, for example, which has made BRACE its supported charity.

In the past week, we have gained greatly from little bits of extra help from two people who belong to groups which have supported BRACE in the last year, and I would like to thank them.

First, there was Ali, who works for IOP Publishing, big supporters of BRACE in 2012. She offered to carry on volunteering for us, and spent a day in the office this month. Out of this came a conversation about the fact that it was so difficult for people to sign up to follow my blog. Well, I like to think that’s the only reason I don’t have more followers.

Ali found that I was missing a simple trick, in that BlogSpot provides a gadget or widget or something which creates a much simpler sign up option. Anyway, with Ali’s help, I installed it and then changed the layout of the blog so readers could actually see the sign-up box without having to prod the margins of the screen with the cursor.

Then there was another problem which has dogged us for even longer. We set up our Facebook page in 2009 and it has never been visible to searches within Facebook or Google searches on, say, brace + facebook. You had to know the URL to find it or navigate there from our website.

This has baffled us. Over time we have asked an SEO expert and various social media clever clogs to help us, all to no avail. Until yesterday, that is, when the new president of the Medical Science Society at UWE, a student society supporting BRACE for the third year running, came in to introduce herself. I don’t know how it came up in conversation, but Sofi said she thought she might know what to do. A few minutes later – bingo!

Thank you Sofi, thank you Ali. These look like small contributions to our work, but they could be very big. Who knows how much of a difference they could make to our visibility and, as a result, the resources we could bring in future to dementia research?

Just a small reminder that you don’t need a fat bank account, hours and hours of spare time or a doctorate in biochemistry to make a worthwhile contribution to fighting dementia.

Jo just doesn’t stop

I like writing about our more remarkable supporters, and Jo Earlam is certainly in that category.

Jo ran the London Marathon for us last year but it wasn’t her first marathon and she didn’t exactly stop at the finishing line. She has set out to run 50 marathons before she reaches the age of 50 in 2015, which is a pretty tall order. From recent correspondence, I know that she has been running in Devon and Barcelona among other places this year.

Not the finishing line yet!



The image that springs to mind is Forrest Gump running unstoppably across the USA and back again. There are lots of obvious differences, of course, not least that Jo has a serious purpose in raising funds for dementia research, taking her painful experience of having two loved ones with dementia and converting it into a very positive contribution.

The reason that I am writing about Jo again this week is that she is now at the half way stage in her marathon of marathons. She has also started a new blog in which she bravely writes about living with OCD as well as the herculean task she has set herself. Jo, a journalist by trade, writes well and I would encourage you to read her blog. Keep up with her if you can!

What the scientists say about us

Trying to communicate what we do and the difference we make isn’t always easy. The message can often be a complicated one and the beneficial results of research are eked out over many years. However much the headline writers like to shout “Coffee could cure Alzheimer’s” and other improbable things, good science has to be painstaking and moves at an almost geological pace.

It’s therefore a great week when I can quote two top dementia research scientists who have worked with BRACE for years and who have put their finger on how we make a crucial difference. I would argue that we have a special and possibly unique role in engaging the public as well, but this about BRACE’s impact on research.

On Monday, Professor Seth Love of the University of Bristol compared BRACE to Heineken or, rather, its famous marketing line. Seth told a group of volunteers that BRACE reaches the parts that other charities don’t. This was not a criticism of other charities, which make a huge contribution (much bigger than ours in absolute financial terms), but pinpointed the way in which we help start research initiatives which might not otherwise see the light of day. There is ample evidence that these prove worthwhile and can lead to greater things later, once the principle has been tested.

Members of the Dementia Research Group

I was then more than a little chuffed when a copy of a local magazine (“Downend & Mangotsfield Matters”) landed on my desk, with an article about Dr Patrick Kehoe across its centre pages. Pat, who was feted as a local resident, is a colleague of Seth Love and part of the Bristol Dementia Research Group. The article focused a lot on a major clinical drug trial that is about to start (one of the greater things resulting from BRACE-funded research that I mentioned just now). However, Pat also talked about the role that this charity has played in making this and other research possible.

He said, “There is no way I’d have gathered sufficient evidence to justify the running of this trial without that initial funding from BRACE. This small, local charity has paved the way for world class study and I really want the public to know the difference they make when they put their odd £1 or £2 into a collecting tin, or support fundraising activities in the name of this amazing charity and others.”

We couldn’t really want a better endorsement than this and our supporters couldn’t want a clearer confirmation that they have made a difference already.