TrashbatLondon

I upvoted you! You're dead right. I've been doing a few bits of movie financing lately which have given me a bit more insight into the wider process (mainly though going for pints with the director after pitch meetings) and while I'm no expert, there's certainly no expectation of getting any people to work for free. Naturally they're trying to get some good will freebies from companies wherever possible, but it's just not an option to force people to work for free. If you can't secure enough money to pay the people you need for your production, you don't deserve the be making it, end of.

Thanks for the response. For what it’s worth, I think you should widen your view on how political charities can and should be. A children’s cancer research organisation may come out against a pharma giant for some reason, perhaps because they’re withholding a patent that would save many lives. You have many towns across the country where that pharma giant is the only employer and people might not take too kindly to their livelihoods being interfered with.

It’s absolutely a charities responsibility to manage that properly, but for a third party service who has no input into policy, you can easily find yourself caught in the middle of some tricky situations that have wide ripples. Charities tend to be held to a higher standard than private companies so those ripples are incredibly difficult to predict.

Hi Jimmy, based on your (let’s say, charitably, wine induced) forays into fake news, what makes you think anyone will trust you to not fall into the exact same traps every other social network has done?

How do you envisage the risk going with this?

Two scenarios spring to mind:

1) a charity takes a bold decision (as they should) to speak out about a controversial topic in between you shopping boxes and them arriving. Half of your customer base object to the moral stance and cancel. What happens to the business and how exposed are charities that have already invested.

2) Similar but on the other end of the scale, a charity gets embroiled in a scandal, and the public turn en masse. Meanwhile your boxes land on doorsteps and enrage your customers. Again, if you have significant unplanned attrition, how protected are other charities both in terms of their financial outlay and association with brand?

Additionally, how do you reconcile scale? Are you floating costs or are charities having to provide excess stock based on your projections? If you have a deal with a hospice, and you’re subscriptions blow up, how many more T-shirts are they now under pressure to produce or does your model allow for this?

It’s an interesting model and I think as long as it doesn’t cannibalize existing donors it could do well at opening up new markets. I do worry about how quickly you run out of charities that just don’t get it though. It’s a famously not commercially savvy business and the 40% margin might prove a significant barrier to entry regardless of actual success of the model.

Any policy making that uses the mask of culture or tradition is normally rooted in a belief that the alternative is inferior. So if a conservative cites preserving traditions as a reason to impose strict border controls, they’re doing so because there’s an implication that immigration will erode traditions for the worse. Much like conservatives opposition to gay marriage is rooted in a belief that it will devalue straight marriage, which they see as superior.