No man’s an island and why it’s a very good job

“Enthusiasm is excitement with inspiration, motivation, and a pinch of creativity.” – Bo Bennett

Search for quotes on enthusiasm and you’re unlikely to find any negative ones. Is it possible to be too enthusiastic and get too over-excited and carried away?

The official line

Ask the professionals and I suspect they’ll tell you that enthusiasm is one of the most important tools of the trade. Whether this is because it can’t be taught and is priceless or because they have genuinely got where they are today thanks to bucket loads of the stuff, I’ll leave for you to discuss.

Real life

Those of us living in the real world will have plenty of anecdotal evidence of occasions where it hasn’t been great to be too enthusiastic. It helps if you know your limitations too. I know that I get very easily carried away. I also know that sometimes I get so excited by something, I lose sight of the big picture.

An example

As regular readers will know, the last couple of days I’ve been on a campaign to persuade Sir Richard Branson to cover the cost for all BMyCharity registered charities to switch to his fundraising model: Virgin Money Giving. This happened because our previous provider, BMyCharity, announced last week that they would be shutting down at the end of the month.

Look at Richard Branson’s @ messages on Twitter and you’ll see that lots of lovely folks like you have been asking him to read my previous post. I’ve had a promise from a lovely lady called Hannah in Virgin Finance that she’ll forward my email on to head office. The Give A Brick website as well as the Virgin Money Giving blog have been red hot with comments all day. It’s been an amazing and very exciting hive of activity.

On another post, an interesting sideways discussion has developed with Alex from the Just Giving team. Just to remind you, Just Giving ask charities to pay £15 per month to use their service and charge 5% commission and VAT on top of that. Given that I jump up and down with joy over every single brick, I’ve always been reluctant to use Just Giving while alternatives exist.

However, Just Giving are the only site of the three main ones that offer Paypal with Gift Aid. When you kindly Give A Brick via Paypal here on this website, 77p goes to support our first project. The rest goes direct to Paypal. Just Giving have negotiated a super low fee of 1.6% with Paypal which with the addition of Gift Aid, means that despite their 5% commission, £1.19 would go direct to supporting our first project.

When I realised that the majority of our bricks come via Paypal, I got very excited. Alex from Just Giving very kindly said that we could have a 3 month free trial of their service and I got even more excited. There was the small issue of their minimum donation amount being £2 but what’s a unique selling potential between friends?

Enter Dr Egg

So I spoke to Dr Egg, Give A Brick treasurer and also my dad. It helps having a dad as one of your trustees because when you’re getting excited and carried away, he won’t be afraid to rein you in a little He reminded me that we’ve had use of the BMyCharity service for the last three months and aside from setting him up with a fundraising page, we’ve not done much with it. There are only so many hours in the day, what is going to change so that we might explore and use full potential of Just Giving to such an extent that it will be worth paying them £15 every month?

I worked our that for us to break even with Just Giving, we would need to be receiving 36 bricks via Paypal every single month. And all would need to be given with Gift Aid. Don’t get me wrong, 36 bricks isn’t much and in the long term I believe there may still be value in exploring this option but here’s the deal breaker:

Just Giving has a minimum donation amount of £2.

If you don’t know why Give A Brick is called Give A Brick then the previous sentence won’t mean very much to you (and it also means I’m not doing a good enough job of explaining what we’re about ) “Give A Brick (i.e. just £1) then ask your friends to do the same” I’m told it’s our USP, our unique selling potential.

There are literally thousands of charities all vying for your attention and generosity. Give A Brick is the first charity that genuinely wants everyone to only give £1 and then tell their friends. How do we do that if we’re using a fundraising service that can only accept donations of £2 or more?

If you follow me on Facebook or Twitter you’ll have heard how troubled and confused I was by this whole discussion earlier today. Thanks to the fact that I’m not an island and Dr Egg’s clear thinking, I’m now much more fully resolved to work with our USP and keep on producing blog posts that enthuse, inspire, motivate and prompt one to think in exchange for everyone very kindly giving a brick when they feel it is appropriate.

P.S. I totally forgot to mention, BMyCharity have announced just this afternoon that they are saved. They are joining forces with Help For Heroes and will form a new brand called BMyHero. Might tie in rather nicely with some of our post categories and it means that if Sir Richard chooses not to get in touch, we’re still good for a fundraising page provider. Cool eh?

P.P.S. If you read that last piece of news with a sense of anti-climax, don’t worry, you’re not alone. As pleased as I am for BMyCharity, I was rather enjoying rallying the troops