BULLS**T BINGO. An important announcement from the Association of Charitable Charities for Good Causes
The Association of Charitable Charities for Good Causes is pleased to confirm that its General Secretary, Miss Cat Rescue, will be appearing at the Wild Times Gathering alongside her long-standing associate, Major Phil Anthropy, Treasurer of the UK Combined Agricultural Charities.
Together, they will be facilitating a rigorous, evidence-based and sector-leading session of Charity Bulls**t Bingo.
For too long, the charitable sector has allowed some of its finest phrases to languish unread in annual reports, impact reports, strategy documents and CEO introductions.
Phrases such as:
“At a time of unprecedented challenge…”
“We have continued to put communities at the heart of everything we do…”
“Through partnership, innovation and collaboration…”
“We are proud to have been on a journey…”
These words deserve more.
They deserve to be read aloud with the dignity, gravitas and slight sense of bewilderment with which they were presumably written.
And this is where our fabulous facilitators come in.
At the Wild Times Gathering, Miss Cat Rescue and Major Phil Anthropy will be giving selected extracts from charity annual reports and impact reports the full treatment, while attendees attempt to complete their Bullsh*t Bingo cards.
REMEMBER- this is your chance to win some fabulous prizes.
We need your submissions
We are therefore inviting colleagues from across the sector to nominate their favourite examples of charitable report-writing. Please send your nominations to betsy@thesocialchangenest.org.
Perhaps it is the opening to an annual report that says absolutely everything while communicating almost nothing. Perhaps it contains an exceptional concentration of the words resilience, journey, ecosystem, co-creation, transformative, meaningful change or lived experience. Perhaps you have read the same introduction every year since 2014, with only the dates altered. Or perhaps there is a particular paragraph which caused you to quietly put the report down and stare into the middle distance.
SEND.IT.TO.US.
We are particularly interested in introductions from:
- Annual reports
- Impact reports
- Strategy documents
- Chair or CEO statements
- Funding programme reports
- Anything beginning with the phrase “Now, more than ever…”
You may submit your own organisation’s work, somebody else’s, or an extract that has simply stayed with you.
All nominations will be considered by the Association’s Subcommittee for Language, Impact and Strategic Verbosity, subject to the usual governance procedures.
Names can, of course, be withheld to protect the innocent.
The prose, however, must face the consequences.
Want to join the bingo?
If you’d like to discuss community responses to crises and place-based giving further, why not join us at the Wild Times Gathering in Birmingham on the 15th of September? We’d love to see you there!
