Sunday, 1 September 2013

Charity talk

Not sure how much attention I am going to get with this post as it's the North London Derby, but it's very important so if you could please retweet/share this with everybody you know I'd be very, very appreciative.

At the moment I feel like the Gooner On The Road tour is going well. I have been to 4 different countries and met 4 totally new members of the Gooner Family, each whom have been extremely warm and welcoming and have helped me feel like I'm going in the direction I had hoped for. There is quite a steep learning curve that I have been trying to get used to, for example remembering to take pictures everywhere I go (I am guilty of not taking enough whilst traveling), blogging on a frequent basis and writing in a journal every day. I have also had to do this whilst suffering from the dreaded man-cold, which I have moaned about enough so hopefully this will be the last time.

So everything has gone pretty well. But the one thing that is lacking a great deal is the donation side of things. As most of you will know I am raising money for the Triple Negative Breast Cancer (TNBC) Foundation. TNBC killed my mum, and it kills other people's mums, daughters, sisters, aunts and nieces. To be more precise, around 10-20% of Breast Cancer patients are diagnosed with the Triple Negative variant of the strain. Triple Negative is bad news, it's difficult to treat and doesn't have the same characteristics as 'conventional' breast cancer, which means the prognosis is not good. TNBC does not get the same amount of focus as other kinds of breast cancer, and when there isn't as much focus there isn't as much funding, which means it isn't as easy to manage. Ultimately, the chance of survival is considerably lower.

I am trying to do my part to change that. But at the moment I'm struggling to gain any serious momentum with the fundraising side of things, and I think a lot of that has to do with the fundraising tool that I'm using. I had never heard of Razoo before I started using it, and people have been giving me feedback on it, claiming they've been having trouble donating and using it on their mobile devices for example.

So, from the middle of next week I am going to be switching to Paypal for donating. Everybody is familiar with Paypal and they can rest their minds that their well-earned money isn't disappearing into a black hole somewhere. The money that has already been donated through the Razoo site will stay in that pot, and I will figure out how to merge the two together so that I can measure clearly where I am on my goal.

Now let's hope we give 5pur2 a good beating!