Some Tangible Thoughts
Hi Sharon,
Herewith my thoughts on the tangibles (do we really have to call them that?) for the new charity fundraising page. It has not been quite as easy I’d first thought.
Dear Donor,
Thank you for (at least considering the prospect of maybe perhaps possibly) supporting our cause. To help you decide how much to give (do we really want to be as blunt as this?), please consider the following amounts (surely they’ll have left the webpage by now?) and the very real difference they can make to people’s lives.
A Fiver (look, I prefer “fiver” to “five of your English pounds,” alright?) supports a phone consultation for one of our clients (are we sure about this? Has anyone checked the phone bill? And what about when the call goes through to the wrong staff member and they’re about as much help as a stilt walker in an ice skating contest? End up with Maria on the phone and they’ll be lucky if they come away knowing what day it is. Frankly, after three and a half minutes with her, I’d be amazed if they still knew their own name).
A Tenner (anyone know the rhyming slang for this? What is it? Ayrton Senna?) pays for a 1–2–1 session on our specialised equipment (when that equipment actually arrives; if we get the money from our other donors — so, basically, a tenner gets you a 1–2–1 session on specialised equipment you can only be assured we’ll have if you give us more than a tenner — preferably something in the region of five grand, if you happen to have it stashed away in your back pocket. It’s like sodding Ouroboros eating his own tail, this fundraising lark, isn’t it?)
Twenty pounds (alright, what do you call a twenty, then? I call it “more than I’m damn well expecting anyone is ever going to give us) gets you a double-length session / a cup of tea and a biscuit / a nice relaxing sit down in a comfy chair with antimacassar and footstool / something twice the worth of a tenner but I can’t damn well think what that would be now.
Fifty pounds gets you my undying gratitude, if not unconditional love, and the promise that the pair of us will elope one day as far as we possibly can from a world where we have to provide sodding tangibles for every little thing we do when it doesn’t work like that and why the hell can’t we be honest about staff and office and electricity and the rest of it all costing us money? Not everything we raise can go on “doing good”. We’ve got to make sure the staff don’t fricking freeze first.
(Oh, and finally…and, yeah, I’m being heavily aspirational here…)
One Hundred pounds gets you my envy, because if I could give that much money right now to a charity that can’t get its own tangibles in order, I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this list of tangibles in the first place.
