It’s being held at the ICO on Berner’s Street, central London on the 16th March.

Discussion at People Power will be focused on the future of campaigning; the way NGOs have used campaigning to engage consumers, business and government has changed significantly over the last 10 years. We currently have almost 70 registrations including individual campaigners, current clients – Save the Children, RSPB, Christian Aid, Action Aid, Missing People and the National Autistic Society.

Discussion will be led by some of the sectors leaders including, Kumi Naidoo of Greenpeace, Liberty’s Shami Chakrabarti, prison reformer Jonathan Aitken, as well as Tony Benn. See attached the final programme.

As an agency we are really looking forward People Power, if you haven’t got your ticket yet, hurry up, they are selling out fast, you can book your place at http://peoplepower.eventbrite.com/ or find out more about the speakers and the programme at www.peoplepower2010.org.uk.

Any questions or inquiries don’t hesitate to contact me on 020 3031 3644.

We look forward to seeing you on the 16th March!

Not many people ask the creative director’s advice about acquisition planning. Fair enough.

But if they did, I’d show them this diagram. It’s pinned to Roger Lawson’s desk and it came out of a discussion we had about budget allocation. The idea is nicked wholesale from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan, and it’s a plan for the ultimate risk-free investment strategy. Spend most of your money on rock-solid, safe-as-houses stuff. Doing that protects you against the risk of new initiatives not working. But you also need to spend some on the new, the untried, the risky. Because then you’re protected against the risk of missing out on the Next Big Thing.

Roger’s amendment to the diagram was a fairly crucial one. He’s the one who crossed out ‘risky’ and put ‘fun’.

Because, after all, some of the work we do, we should do because it just feels right. It’s exciting. Like any Dragon’s Den entrepreneur, you run the risk that your wide-eyed enthusiasm is completely misplaced and you don’t make your money back. But of course, there’s also the chance that you’ll hit on something with real potential. Something that’ll be the new ‘safe as houses’ in a year or two.

So when you’re planning your budget, don’t forget to keep some fun money aside. It’s risky not to.

The reason I’m writing about it now (apart from that it’s on our ipod this month) is that there’s a campaign to get Spasticus Autisticus to number one in March, to mark what would have been Ian’s birthday. And I just don’t know what to do about it.

I have to confess to a ton of personal influences here. One of my sons has autism and, like any protective father I’m very sensitive to disability issues. Did Dury, a polio sufferer, really have the right to talk about autism? He spent some years at the legendary Chailey Heritage school in Sussex, surrounded by children with disabilities of all kinds, so perhaps he did. There’s a family connection too – my brother’s partner Jemima is Ian’s daughter and has recently lived through the catharsis of Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll hitting the screens. I want to help her dad’s memory live on, because I know it matters to her.

I’m torn. It makes me uncomfortable. Maybe this is a good thing. Spasticus Autisticus was written to make me so. Maybe I don’t get to judge whether it’s an offensive anachronism or a powerful call for respect. Maybe disabled people do. There’s a great interview with a disability rights campaigner here who says that the record remains ‘a number one in waiting’. What would the people with autism I’ve met over the years think? Offended? Proud? Nonplussed? Probably all of the above – they are different people, after all.

I don’t know which way I’ll go. And I don’t know whether the campaign will succeed. What I do know – and what Spasticus Autisticus reminds us – is that challenge is good for you. Have a cringe. Have a wince. Have a listen.

You won’t feel better for it. But that’s the point.

What constantly trips me up is that we don’t have a word for those people.

In fundraising we’ve always used ‘donor’. But that’s just not good enough any more. It implies a solely financial relationship, and while that’s no bad thing, we also know that the most valuable donors are often, paradoxically, more than just donors – they’re people who give, campaign, do events, set up Facebook groups about their favourite causes. We’ve been using the word ‘supporter’ but even this doesn’t go far enough. It’s often not just about someone’s support for a particular organisation, but their commitment to a cause.

An age ago when I worked on FMCG marketing we had the term ‘consumer’ which also reduced humans to the status of units on one end of a transaction. It seemed to work if you were flogging Persil Liquitabs, or Campbell’s Soup (for which we devised the epithet ‘heavy soup user’).

But what we’re interested in at the Good Agency is the totality of ways in which people can change the world for the better. Where and how they shop. What they build their houses from. Where they go on holiday and how they get there. What they do for a living. How they campaign for change and, of course, how they support their favourite charities. Ethical choices are everywhere, and we think that understanding values means we have a role to play in helping people make all of them.

What that doesn’t leave us with is a useful, marketing-friendly term for, er, people. Donor. Supporter. Campaigner. Consumer. All too narrow. Agent? Actor? Too daft.

I hope you haven’t been reading this blog expecting an answer, because I don’t have one. Do you?

Tiger White PR (part of the Good Agency group) had the brief to launch Ascenta’s new omega-3 supplement. NutraSea had already achieved success in the Canadian market and was ready to hit the UK. The challenge was how to make a bang in an already-crowded market.

So Tiger White PR invited 30 influential health journalists to attend the launch and sample Heston Blumenthal’s famous cooking – taste being the theme of the day. The day consisted of a series of presentations by the Ascenta team, who came over from Nova Scotia for the event, and a registered nutritionist, Dr Rafe Bundy, who added credibility to the brand. After the presentations, the journalists were treated to 12-course lunch courtesy of The Fat Duck. NutraSea was included in the dessert to prove that it doesn’t have the strong fishy taste and smell of other omega-3 products.

The media were so impressed by the launch and the NutraSea product that we secured several high-profile pieces of coverage. And it goes without saying, the Ascenta team is absolutely delighted.

Identifying businesses which meet defined criteria for social enterprise, the Mark will help consumers identify businesses trading for social and environmental purposes.  Developed by a group of social enterprise leaders working with the COI and the Office of the Third Sector, the Mark was launched at Voice 10, the Social Enterprise Coalition’s annual national conference.

With support from The Big Lottery Fund, Angela Smith MP, Minister for the Third Sector and John Bird, founder of Big Issue, the Mark’s message was reflected in a thrilling performance by No Fit State Circus, a Social Enterprise Mark holder and an animated film produced by The Good Agency.

But the launch is just the beginning…

Now that the dry ice has settled our job really begins: helping to raise the profile of the Mark and putting social enterprises where they belong, at the heart of the UK economy.  Did you know that this emerging sector contributes a staggering £24 billion to the UK economy? If you didn’t, now that The Good Agency PR team is on the case, you soon will.

On 10 February, 180 representatives of the corporate and financial sectors gathered in the City of London to hear first-hand the results of the first Annual Review of the Forest Footprint Disclosure Project.  The Review analyses the answers to questionnaires delivered by 35 international companies – all innovators have disclosed information to help assess how their activities directly or indirectly contribute to deforestation.

The report reveals to what extent the sourcing and extraction of commodities such as palm oil, soy, timber, beef, leather and biofuels impacts on deforestation – it’s a vital new measure of sustainability, and one that The Good Agency has played a key role in launching.

Visit www.forestdisclosure.com for further information and to download the Report.

The trouble is, not only am I rubbish at predicting the future, I don’t actually believe in it.

Broadly I’m a believer in the Black Swan thesis – we’re terrible at predicting the future, but very good at post-rationalising, or just conveniently forgetting about, our predictions afterwards.

I was very bemused by the sudden slew of financial experts who popped up after the Credit Crunch to tell us how to get out of it. None of whom had had the foresight to tell us how to avoid it – or even that it was weaving erratically down the road towards us at all. Some experts.

In the early 60’s, many people paid handsomely to predict trends in music thought the Beatles weren’t worth hiring. In the 90’s, plenty of people whose job it was to find successful writers turned down JK Rowling (now the world’s biggest selling author). No-one saw 9/11 coming – although afterwards (as soon as it was too late) we enforced a major crackdown on global terror.

Do you really think that anyone in 1970 really had the faintest idea what 1980 would look like?

So much for futurology.

So where does this leave me, in June? Believe it or not, I’m not that worried. Because my confident prediction is that, as ever, our discussion about the future will actually be a discussion about now.

Perhaps we’ll start with a discussion about cheques, which are due to be phased out in 2018. The IoF thinks this will be a major problem for charities. (Given that quite a few charities haven’t quite grasped the significance of direct debit yet, I guess this could be true.)

But it won’t really be a discussion about cheques dying out. It’ll be about people who pay for things by cheque dying out, and where that leaves the traditional model of charity giving. Because cheques are a symptom, not a cause. That’s a discussion about now, not 2018

Anyway, I suspect we’ll have bigger things to worry about after the Venusians make contact next year.

WARNING Dangerous analogy approaching!

Last night the penny dropped. Hustling and marketing, especially by real experts, share many characteristics.

The TV series follows a group of con artists who specialise in ‘long cons’ – extended deceptions which require greater commitment, but which return a higher reward than simple confidence tricks. In our world the ‘long con’ is a campaign, an ongoing series of messages that take time to build up and yet deliver better results.

Then there’s the mark. (Or the consumer as we like to call them.) In Hustle the team get to know their mark inside out. Their habits, their likes and dislikes. Where they live, what they eat, etc. That’s their intelligence.

They find out what ‘con’ will lure in the mark. Note: they don’t have a great idea for a con then force it on the mark, they design a con around them.

Successful marketing campaigns are built with the target in mind. They make sure the consumer is in the market for the communication rather than firing off random messages into the ether in the vague hope they reach home.

And finally the Hustle team carefully prepare every detail to make sure it all goes to plan. We use creativity: powerful photography, attractive colours and beautifully crafted copy to ensure all our efforts don’t go unnoticed. Impact is everything.

And there the analogy should end.

In all my years in this business I’ve never felt that I’ve hustled any consumer. Yes there’s an art to what we do, but con artists we are not. The argument that advertising exploits typical human qualities such as greed, vanity, and naïveté can be countered by the confidence tricksters own adage: ‘You can’t cheat an honest man.’