I’ve been pondering a lot on ethics recently. Ethics of and in blogging, company ethics, charitable endeavours. And suddnely my inbox is now overflowing with a new type of blog beg – the charitising plea.
This is the missive, usually from an external (and presumably junior) PR hired by a company, that starts with a fervent claim to have read and enjoyed my blog, but despite this has singularly failed to identify my name (I don’t usually answer to Making it Up, although at a pinch liveotherwise would do). It then goes on, wading heavily through grammatical errors, and stray and/or missing apostrophes, to tell me what wonders the company they’d like to tell me about is performing in terms of charitable good works, and how they’d just like me to lend my voice to their campaign, which doesn’t in the slightest advertise their company at all, no no really it doesn’t, nor is it trying to climb on the latest bandwagon of hiding behind good deeds. It’s all about the charity after all, isn’t it guv?
I’m not impressed. I’m not impressed by the blatant begging and appeals to my better nature – my better nature has been expressing itself very nicely thank you without any need to advertise thinly disguised voting competitions that will only cause more heartache to those that get involved. Or competitions that will result in intellectual property (slogans, logos, whatever) that the company will use, having got for a song along the way. And so I’m not going to play. I will continue to consider genuine charity campaigns (although the gradually blurring line between business and charity and politics bothers me too – is it really still a charity if it’s funded by taxpayers’ pounds that are then used to lobby the government in an incestuous circle?) but I will choose what I support and how I support it. I’m even beginning to think better of my own fundraising efforts – it just feels wrong to continually attempt to extort money from my friends no matter how good the cause, so I may have to think of another way to raise the funds for the library I’d love to build. (No, I’m not going to give up on the reading/ reviewing 100 books thing. I started, so I’ll finish 😉 )
But one thing is for sure. I’ll be thinking harder on what I can do to be the change as that incredibly catchy quote goes. I’m fairly sure it won’t involve any more charitising.
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