Ok, I got spammed by this Singapore company Brew Creative. Apparently, I might not be the only one getting spammed.
Now, I took a closer look and tried to figure out who was responsible for the mail:
And realized who this Vicki Lew of Brew Creative was. She is the lady behind the infamous AWARE EOGM T-Shirts.
So, that might be the connection. I followed the AWARE saga quite keenly, and probably added my email somewhere during the whole period for some X show of support for the old AWARE guard, or during the aftermath, foolishly added my email on a list that I thought was affiliated with AWARE and related charities.
Oh, wait, so that’s why I might have got the email. Because this email is about raising funds for a charity.
Or is it?
Let’s look at the mail:
60% of the profits for each t-shirt sold will be donated to the CCF.
Look, volunteering to help a charity is a commendable effort. Giving money to a charity deserves a hearty pat on the back if the warm fuzzy feeling you have inside you isn’t enough.
But trying to make money off your efforts to help a charity. This stinks of NKF-entitlement complex. 40% of the profits go to the designer. WTF.
A charity isn’t a marketing tool to hawk your products. We aren’t asking you to make a loss. The printing company should be compensated for cost. And maybe, I’m being generous here of course, the printing company can make money. But if the designer (I’m assuming Vicki is the designer here) is going to put her name out there and saying she is going to help raise funds, then, seriously, there is something wrong with this picture here.
It is perfectly fine to say, look, I’m running a business. That business is designing T-shirts. I’m going to design a shirt for Singapore’s first Twestival (why why why am I think Twatival) and I’m going to sell it. I hope to make some money. After I make some money, I’m going to give a part of that amount to a charity.
But you start with,
Brew Creative and Printeet.com are lending a hand at Singapore’s very first Twestival, where the Twitter community gets together to aide a charity.
Singapore Twestival 2009 aims to raise $5000 for the Children’s Cancer Foundation (CCF).
And only in the last line of the 3 paragraph do you disclose your profit-making intentions on the back of a charity,
To help raise the money, Brew has specially-designed 3 Twitter-related tees. 60% of the profits for each t-shirt sold will be donated to the CCF.
If you (whoever is reading this) can’t tell the difference, you shouldn’t be in marketing.
Oh wait, maybe you should. And that is how our sad pathetic world rolls.
Update:
Vicki has left a comment in reply:
Profit from each t-shirt:
$29.90 – $19.90 = $10
60% to CCF:
$6 per T-shirt
40% to Brew:
$4 per T-shirtWhat does this $4 go into? It goes into covering our operational costs. We are, after all, a small studio and running a T-shirt campaign has us on Twitter and Facebook a lot of the time, answering enquiries and requests. We will also be manning a T-shirt booth at the TwestivalSG so there will be some logistic costs that need to be covered.
That $4 looks like a (valid) cost to me. So this is really about the wording. Do check out the sites, and if you do want to support the cause, get the tickets for the festival here and/or buy the shirts here.
Putting my inner cynic aside, the $4 seems fair (of course, if they sell like a thousand T-shirts, the absolute amount does seem big). The questions really boils down to these:
1. If I am volunteering to raise funds, how much financial cost should I bear?
2. Can the time spent be quantified to a monetary amount?
3. Should I be compensated for my time?
Put it another way, if the CCF paid Brew Creative $4000 to raise $10,000, would we be comfortable with this arrangement?
Tough questions all around.
I know where I stand but what do you guys think?
Daryl Tay | 09-Sep-09 at 12:09 pm | Permalink
I was following the AWARE saga but came nowhere near entering my email with anything related. Neither did I actually buy tickets for Twestival. So I really wonder where the list came from… It’s almost like they just took whoever they could find in social media and spammed them.
Vicki | 09-Sep-09 at 1:54 pm | Permalink
Hi Daryl
Thank you for voicing your opinion, so that we can have the opportunity to clear any doubts the people may have about the amounts we are donating to the CCF.
We’ve endeavored to be as transparent as possible about profits as seen from our statement on the T-shirt fund-raising campaigns on the Printeet site. We’ve not had anyone asking for more details and do apologise for not being as clear as we should.
In response to your post, we have updated this message to make things really really clear.
http://www.printeet.com/shop/twestivalsg/cat_34.html
Here’s a breakdown
Cost price of tees, exclusive offered to Brew by Printeet:
$19.90 for printing, material, handling and logistics
Profit from each t-shirt:
$29.90 – $19.90 = $10
60% to CCF:
$6 per T-shirt
40% to Brew:
$4 per T-shirt
What does this $4 go into? It goes into covering our operational costs. We are, after all, a small studio and running a T-shirt campaign has us on Twitter and Facebook a lot of the time, answering enquiries and requests. We will also be manning a T-shirt booth at the TwestivalSG so there will be some logistic costs that need to be covered.
We assure you that we’re not planning to get rich from the proceeds of the T-shirts and have done our utmost to give as large a portion to the CCF as we can without running a too much of a loss on operations.
[If we wanted to make a nice fat bunch of cash from this charity drive, I think we'd have better luck sticking to our day jobs designing websites and logos.
]
I do want to apologise for infringing on your email privacy. In our enthusiasm to spread the word about the event and t-shirts to prominent Singapore Tweeps and bloggers out there, we did a one-time blast. Thanks for emphasizing on ‘opt-in, opt-in, opt-in’. We’ll be sticking to that and removing irrelevant email addresses.
All in all, we just want to make this event a successful one, and help to hit that $5K mark (and above, if possible!)
My apologies once again, and I hope to see you at the Twestival!
Vicki Lew
iantimothy | 09-Sep-09 at 1:58 pm | Permalink
Hey Vicki, thanks for being upfront about this.
Vic | 09-Sep-09 at 2:35 pm | Permalink
If they are really looking at covering operational cost, there shouldn’t be a fixed amount on each t-shirt.
Profits after deducting the printing and operational cost will go to CCF – This is charity.
One may argue that they may not sell enough t-shirts to earn a profit. With my suggestion, they will not lose a single cent. Probably the AWARE t-shirt sales would have given them a good gauge of the sales volume? *cough*
Some food for thought?
iantimothy | 09-Sep-09 at 2:42 pm | Permalink
But that means CCF might not get anything.
In their case, CCF will at least get something.
I see the cynicism in your last question. And I can only smile
Vic | 09-Sep-09 at 3:13 pm | Permalink
At least they did try, so it is still a commendable effort.
At the end of the day, this t-shirt thingy is not the only means to get donations, isn’t it?
Daniel | 09-Sep-09 at 11:05 pm | Permalink
Hi,
Some of you know me enough that you know where I come from when I say this:
I encourage the cynics, critics and doubters amongst us to do a little bit of soul-searching.
Sure Brew and Printeet may have worded their promotion wrongly, and open to misinterpretation. Sure its seems like they have “spammed” you. Perhaps they believed that the local twittersphere and social media participants would be more than glad to pitch in and lend their support.
From the reaction they’re getting, they were probably wrong.
Here you have a tiny local printing company, and one-person design outfit who have decided to spend their time, effort and – yes, don’t you even doubt it – profits, in support of a charity.
Guess what – they are still far better than the many, many other companies who will never bother with charity. Or the many people who would lend neither help nor money for a good cause.
Brew and Printeet could have easily not donated anything, set up a store at Twestival and people would still have paid good money for them T-shirts. Not a single dollar would have gone towards charity.
And I know there are some of you who are staying away because “it’s a conflict of interest cos my client’s competitor is sponsoring”, or “my competitor is organizing the event”.
I urge you guys to cast aside your natural cynicism aside. Go ask the charities, my friends. They’ll be the first to tell you that it is hard enough as it is to raise funds during this economic downturn.
Because at the rate we’re all jumping at shadows, every company or organization is going to think about engaging the social media or doing charity this way.
Then everybody loses.
iantimothy | 10-Sep-09 at 12:00 am | Permalink
Daniel, don’t you think the ‘at least someone is doing something’ argument is precisely the kind that caused us to initially turn a blind eye to the shenanigans in some of our more famous charities.
“Sure, there are irregularities, and sure they have their hand in the cookie jar, but at least they are getting more money for the organization then the organization could not have possibly ever gotten themselves.”
Sounds like a compromise. No?
But then again, I concede your point while also admitting I’m slightly disingenuous with my example. The people in the now infamous charities were employees of the charity while the individuals mentioned above are running a business and have decided to donate part of their proceeds to charity.
Their responsibilities are different.
The above example is different from say a company which makes nice shirts that I would buy whether or not any of the proceeds went to charity and after i gain utility from the shirt, i further learn that the company has decided to donate part of the money to charity.
The above example is something like I buy a shirt I might not usually spend $30 on, but I do so, because part of the utility I gained from buying the shirt is tied to knowledge that at least some amount of money goes to a charity.
I think in the end, everybody wins when charity is done with no strings attached, where true charity comes at a personal cost and not one done when one has already broken even.
But maybe I’m naive and the world can never be like this.
Yet does that mean it is acceptable to use a charity as a marketing tool? The current setup seems like that to me however I would concede to not know the hearts and minds of men (and women) and I’m viewing the current situation through very tainted prisms.
Daniel | 10-Sep-09 at 12:39 am | Permalink
1. You’re right about being disingenuous. The shenanigans in some of our charities are despicable simply because the people in charge dipped their fingers into the jars meant for the very constituents whom they serve. The other runs a business, whose sole preposition is to make money. If they do give money away, it’s a boon to society.
2. If it is unacceptable to use charities as a marketing tool, then it will be unacceptable to pay anybody who work in charities a salary (personal cost, remember?); likewise it’s unacceptable to volunteer for a charity in return for brownie points or karma. Let’s be consistent, shall we? =)
3. Do the foundations of the world such as Li Ka Shing, Gates, One, Shaw, Kennedy, leverage on marketing when they give? Of course. Do they do it with strings attached? You betcha.
Just that some strings are more acceptable than others. So the question is: Are these strings acceptable to you? In the end, vote with your dollars. If you so wish, give your $29.90 directly to CCF. And you know what? I reckon both Brew and Printeet will be glad that you did, either way.
*Disclosure: I know Dionis of Printeet as we’re both members of The Digital Movement. My company is also sponsoring Twestival, so I may be perceived to want the event to succeed and get good press.
I don’t know Vicki.
iantimothy | 10-Sep-09 at 1:04 am | Permalink
Pt 1: Conceded.
Pt 2: No, it isn’t because the person isn’t going…please donate to charity so I have a job, can get bonus, can … The person is there to fulfill a function that’s needed to keep the charity going and functioning and we can’t let such a person starve if that’s their primary job (i.e. they devote all their time on it and probably/usually get little personal mileage). Now, if it is like the kids you see along Orchard Road who try to get you to donate because they get a commission, then that’s a different story. Their motivation is to get the commission, not to raise funds.
Thin line and there are a lot of gray cases, so I propose this to be a draw.
Pt 3: Yup, they do it with strings attached. Doesn’t make it right because of the names who do it.
Finally, about the “likewise it’s unacceptable to volunteer for a charity in return for brownie points or karma.”
I for one believe that one should do something good with no regard to brownie points or karma. It is hard of course. We are but human. And that’s why everything we do is tainted because there is always the suspicious, maybe even ever present, element of self-interest.
To nitpick, and be damn guai-lan, actually, all things equal, you should only give $6, not $29.90 for the same +ve impact on CCF.
Daniel | 10-Sep-09 at 1:13 am | Permalink
Pt 2: Conceded. I believe in paying for good talent to serve the right function as well. And those third-party “marketing” agencies are f**king leeches who should be legislated against.
Pt 3: Like you, I do believe in giving without strings attached. Which is hard of course, and something I often fail at. But personal convictions are one thing, and corporate missions… quite another.
You’re an idealist, and frankly vocal about your views. That’s a great thing and one of the reasons why I think we get along. =)
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