God Bless us Every One

This year, Open sent a special present to the mums and kids of the Wakhan corridor in north eastern Afghanistan. This region suffers the highest maternal mortality rates in the world and one in three children born there die before their fifth birthday.

Our money will help fund a new mother and baby project run by Mountain Unity. You can find out more abut them at www.mountainunity.org or check out their youtube channel at youtube.com/user/mountunity

Happy Christmas everybody. See you in 2010.

A site made just for Tim

Tim loves to read business books. Or, to be more precise, Tim loves to read the first fifteen pages of business books and then talk about them at length in meetings on the (fairly safe) assumption that nobody else in the room made it to page 16 either.

This site, however, removes the need for him to read more than a single page. Hurrah for Kevin Duncan!

No Rest for the Wicked...

It feels like Christmas, doesn't it? Yet we still have two appeals to create and a mountain of data to crunch. Still, at least we have cheap fairy lights and sellotape.

The F***ing Nutters – An Update

Long-term readers (both of them) might remember this post about my friend David, his family and their bonkers relocation plan. Well, just to keep you in the loop, they just won the prize for Best Short Film at the prestigious Kendal Mountain Film Festival. It's dead short so why not watch it? Then visit them here and give them a few quid.

James

Ice work if you can get it

Today found all of us, our spouses (where applicable) and most of our children (we managed five) in Trafalgar Square to see the launch of the Ice Bear Project or 'Bear in the Square'.

Working with the good people at Tag, we have campaigners there for the duration, a text-response thing and all the usual fun...

Even better, Richard (right) got to unveil our newest gadget – the bluetooth broadcast machine.

This handy unit can be easily pram-mounted (as shown below) to enable hands-free nerding by Tim and Tobin from WWF. And, as I write, it's tirelessly seeking out and talking to all bluetooth enabled phones within a 350 metre radius of Trafalgar Square and encouraging their owners to sign up to the campaign.

This rare afternoon out was a symbolic start to our biggest project yet – WWF's Earth Hour 2010 – and came a day after we won our biggest account yet. More on that when the official announcement is made.

So at the risk of repeating ourselves, we're looking for writers, designers and account managers to help us do all kinds of cool stuff like this. Applications to suggestions@openfundraising.com please.

We really are going to need some help...

James

Mind the Gap

If your interests include maths and social justice (and as a charity direct marketer they should) then you'll probably find this site quite the most incredible thing you have seen in years.

James