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?