So we had our office Christmas party last night, and as always, we over-catered like crazed things, and ended up with a kitchen bench groaning under the weight of it all.
We ended the evening in that tricky place where the food won't survive the night, but wasn't past it enough for us to happily toss it in the bin.
And isn't there just something the the air right now, a sense of caution, a zeitgeist (and who ever knew it had two 'i-s' before the era of spell check?) of restraint that makes it less OK than other years to be done with what you're done with and move onto the next thing?
So the serving staff, a couple of bright young university students, mid 20s, and I bundled it all up and put it in the back of the car, and off they sped into the night, headed for a social services agency.
They returned not long after, quieter than they had left, but feeling pretty good about it all, clearly moved by whatever they had seen there. It was, they said, a humbling experience.
And so two 24 year olds with no affiliation with any cause of its kind felt some sense of emotional connection with a service they may not ever, in their Facebooked, Beboed, You Tubed, SMS'd world ever have stumbled across in their wildest dreams - certainly nobody in their world would ever collide with anybody in the agency's world, except by some serendipitous act of fate. Or smart act of new-style marketing.
And that moment of emotional connection fizzled and faded, I presume, as the evening drew on, to be just a pale imitation of its former self by morning, with it going that wonderful, magical opportunity that comes when those who really care connect with those who truly need, even for a moment.
It's challenging times for charities as the cashless society goes about its plastic-encased business and the 90 second consumer gets harder and harder to connect with, let alone engage. Challenging times call for opportunistic solutions, but not of the old-school kind. Targeted, rather than mass, permission based winning over 'interruption' tactics every time.
Deep and enduring, rather than shallow and fleeting, is the order of the day. Seth Godin's Permission Marketing stands like a beacon in the night to charities struggling to find ways to make every connection count - it should be on the Required Reading list of every fundraising manager in town.
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