"I find your work really accessible, thanks for sharing so much of it for free and for making it easily understandable."

Lindsay Woodward, Fundraising Manager at Leicester & Leicestershire Animal Aid Association.

As it's the season of goodwill, we're giving away The 12 Insights of Christmas. They look at some of the key issues facing the charity sector and include research, interviews and advice from charities and from us. Unwrap our 12 free reports just in time for Christmas.

World Mental Health Day was on the 10^th of October, so here is a topical tour of the way mental health charities are tackling stigma and battling some misleading media stories.

The Sun newspaper stormed straight into the spotlight just a few days before World Mental Health Day with the blaring headline ‘1200 killed by mental patients’. It referred to homicide victims who were murdered by so called ‘mental patients over the past ten years.  These figures glared angrily out of newsagents’ windows across the UK, emanating shame and stigma for those affected by mental health issues.

It expressed exactly the attitudes that charities like Rethink Mental Illness and Mind are constantly battling to change; the notion that people with mental health problems are somehow dangerous and unlike the rest of us.

In actual fact, one in four people in the UK live with a mental health condition. Many bear their struggles silently. They are so intent on hiding it for fear of discrimination that you can’t always tell when somebody is struggling.

I'm a big fan of nfpSynergy. They provide the strongest opinion pieces in our sector.

Adrian Sargeant - Robert F. Hartsook Professor of Fundraising, Indiana University

As the nfpSynergy blog has become weekly and its readership has steadily increased to over 2500 a month, it got me thinking; why do some people blog and some don’t? How about you? Are you thinking about why you do or don’t?

How about now?

I think blogging is important for any business, but it’s especially important for charities. It’s the perfect way to publicise issues, stories or opinions that your press team might not, for whatever reason, send to the mainstream media. It can often be these kinds of pieces that convert someone to your cause or inspire someone to volunteer, fundraise and make a difference.

For those who aren’t familiar with Dave Fishwick and the ‘Bank of Dave’, he’s an ex-DJ, self-made millionaire with a minibus business from Burnley. His is the story of a man with a big idea to solve a big problem. Living by his mantra of ‘never, ever, ever give up’, he took on the biggest of the big boys (and they are mainly boys). And he won. Even though most of us will never undertake this kind of crusade, Dave’s story provides some lessons and inspiration for us all.

When I first came across Oxfam’s ‘Food for All’ campaign, it did what any campaign should do upon first acquaintance; it captured my attention. This is quite something considering we are constantly bombarded by advertisements for films, dating websites, nose sprays and box springs in or on trains, tubes, buses, taxis and cycle rickshaws as well as TV and the Internet. Somewhere among all of these are charity appeals. I usually can’t see the wood (good cause) for the trees (consumerism galore). 

Over the last decade a slow motion drama has unfolded between fundraisers and the public from whom they want to fundraise. As fundraisers have had to raise ever more amounts to fund the work of their organisations, they have blocked their ears to the voices of donors who have tried to tell them that they don’t like the techniques they now deploy.

We have told ourselves that a mild irritation is a small price to pay for raising the money that changes lives. We have kidded ourselves that the end justifies the means.