The organizers of the Nurses Hardship Fund in the UK came up with a great idea to raise funds. They encouraged all of the soccer players in the English Premier division to donate a single days wages to their cause. If all the players agreed, they would raise £1.5 million. They ended up having 255 players that signed up to support the cause, pledging a total of £750,000. Still not a bad total, although to date they’ve only collected around £200,000 of the total pledged.

Today, the manager of Middlesbrough F.C. pulled his support from the cause stating that he felt that the charity was effectively blackmailing players into signing up to donate by naming those players that had donated, effectively shaming those that hadn’t by omission (note in the image below I think they may want to change the bit that says that the Middlesbrough manager is on board).

Currently a search on Google for “Nurses Hardship Fund” shows decent results about the charity, but a news search has the Middlesbrough story currently coming in in first place. If Universal search was active for that term, you can bet that story would be in the top 10 for that term, as it stands should that story get some traction behind it (links), it could move up there anyway and become a reputation management issue for the Nurses. After all, how many charities want to see search results with the words “name and shame” and “blackmail” coming up for their name?

Filed under: Non-Profits on Thursday, October 11th, 2007 by Simon Heseltine |
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