A Diabetes UK volunteer asks for donations, yesterday
It’s poll results times again – hurrah! Last month we kicked off a barely disguised popularity contest by asking who’s your favourite UK-based diabetes charity.
Despite the inexplicable unpopularity of Diabetes UK’s recent rebrand (“I’ll never support you again, you bastards, unless you reinstate the pink hummingbird!”) they came out top by some way, with 35% of the total vote. Here at Shoot Up we like DUK, but don’t really know why. Insightful, we ain’t.
The other charity that you’ve actually heard of – the JDRF – was your second favourite with 22% of the vote. Insulin Dependent Diabetes Trust came in with 4% and Diabetes Research & Wellness Foundation and Seek Diabetes Awareness scored no votes at all.
The hilarious irony of a charity called Seek Diabetes Awareness not getting any votes is clearly not lost on us.
However, a good proportion of you voted to screw all charities and squander your cash on booze and wild women / men instead. This is certainly something Shoot Up would advocate and, in fact, strongly encourages. So there.
This month we ask for your food-related nemeses – does pizza send your blood glucose into the heavens; does Chinese takeaway lead to days of misery or do you just eat salad all the time? Vote over in the right hand column over there >>
Those results in full:
- Diabetes UK 35%
- I’d rather spend my money on booze & wild women / men 33%
- Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation 22%
- Charity begins at home 7%
- Insulin Dependent Diabetes Trust 4%
- Diabetes Research & Wellness Foundation 0%
- Seek Diabetes Awareness 0%
Where did Seek Diabetes Awareness come from? Never heard of them until right now! Can’t believe more people didn’t vote for Booze & Wild Nights, so disappointed with fellow Shoot Up viewers! 😉
Quick read of their website, Says they specialise in “Diabetes awareness within the amongst black and minority ethnic (BME) groups” and from the way there website reads they are mainly interested in Type 2 or Non-Insulin Dependant diabetes… No wonder nobody here has heard of them……
Look, they’ve got a website and everything – http://www.seekdiabetes.org/
I voted for booze several times but still to no avail.
To be fair to them, given their target audience is black and minority ethnic (BME) groups they probably don’t care too much that we haven’t heard of them. While we know all about ShootUp reader Abba preferences, we don’t know about ethnicity, but I’d take a wild guess from looking at some of our profile pics that we’re not top of their target list.
That is indeed a very fair point.
Must admit, I’d not heard of them either. Which is slightly worrying – for me and them, I guess.
I find it worrying that enough readers voted as a joke & made duk no 1!
He he! Go on then Paul, what’s wrong with DUK? You have 1,500 words to rant 😉
*listens attentively* 🙂
*watches tumbleweed* Paul must really be girding himself for a really good rant. I, for one, am looking forward to it!
I hope this doesn’t take the shine off our win…
Well to start off with they currently want to be known as DiABETES UK or seam to think that just “i” will do. its all a bit Apple-ist to me,… I-Phone, I-Pad, I-Pod, dIabetes…… next we’ll get Diabetes-XP 🙂
I vote they get renamed Diabetroot UK. After all we are always being told to eat more fruit and veg.
REALLY?
I’m the only one?!?!?!?!?
Ok.
Slimming it down from 1500 words…
(other than the stupendous amounts of money they’ve wasted re-branding other the years)
(the lack of a mission statement of aims & objectives)
(or the lack of useful support to type 1’s)
The bit which gets me most is that they’re useless at both the media awareness & yet love to be in the media, several times recently I’ve seen them on BBC news ‘talking for diabetics’ on subjects that have nothing to do with diabetes (fruit & veg for example) & frankly coming up with stupid comments in the vain hope of getting some air time, particularly when they don’t even get to say something about diabetes!?!?!?!?
At the very least if someone from DUK is going to go on national news & talk for me I expect them to be a type 1, I’d kinda love to know how many of their staff actually have to live with this disease!
I’m sticking to my tried & tested alcohol until @tim & @alison realise that they can create a charity that speaks for us types ones (and stripy kat users who stumble hear by mistake & get indoctrinated)
Actually all joking aside DUK really ****** me off… The hummingbird may have been calming but I guess their highly paid image consultants didn’t see that.
I’m up for the tried & tested alcohol thing Paul! Works for me!
This leads to an interesting discussion – what would you do if you were in charge of Diabetes UK? I’ve started a forum thread here:
http://www.shootuporputup.co.uk/user-groups/shoot-up/forum/topic/if-i-were-in-charge/
That somewhat takes the shine off our poll-topping…!
Thanks for bothering to write it though. We are trying to work harder to ensure the work we do and the successes we have are communicated more widely. And we do have clear aims and objectives and we do provide a lot of useful support to people with Type 1.
What happens, I feel, is that there’s a lot of media around obesity and health at the moment that picks up the Type 2 messages, which is why this is seemingly more prominent. We do love to be in the media, and have had more coverage than ever over the last few months (our Putting Feet First campaign got a lot of coverage, as did our 15 healthcare essentials – both of which benefit everyone with diabetes, regardless of type). It’s not always easy for us to dictate what any media coverage is about though, but the fact that we are invited to comment is a step in the right direction.
We’re building a brilliant network of media volunteers too who are helping us with our media coverage and are able to give an “on the ground” perspective of their lives with diabetes. This has been really important for us and a huge help in getting more media coverage.
This perception of our support for Type 1s is something we’ve taken notice of though, and are working on doing more on this. I’m working on a Type 1 symptoms video for launch later this this year, and we’re planning a children’s Type 1 campaign (details of which are being planned right now). I’m making sure that the comments from sites like this, and our own social media sites, are all fed back to help form what we *should* be doing. If there are any things specifically that you (or any one else here) think we should do, or would like to see, I’m all ears and can make sure I get this information back to the relevant people.
I don’t have figures on how many people working here have diabetes themselves, but I know of a lot. And that’s before we even look at those who have a close family connection to the condition. Regardless of that though, staff believe in what we’re doing and are making sure that people with diabetes are as involved as possible in our work to make sure our messaging is correct and on target.
A lot has been said on our rebranding, including some good posts from this fine site, but we did feel it was necessary to rebrand. People just didn’t know who we were, or what the kingfisher/dove/hummingbird (it’s been called all types of winged creatures over the years) meant. This didn’t help us get our messages out there and meant we had to work even harder to be noticed.
Things have changed a lot her since Barbara Young took over the reigns, and for the better I think. There is a clearer direction as to where we should be going and what we should be doing. This will hopefully become more apparent over coming months.
I’ve seen the forum thread about what people would do if they were in charge of Diabetes UK – that made for good reading and I’ll keep an eye on the comments and make them know to various people here.
Now, Tim, about this pay rise and Porsche…
(That turned out to be quite a long post, sorry!)
Thanks Joe – I really like the fact that DUK seems to genuinely be trying to engage with diabetics on the ground (as evidenced in a small way by your post above). I think readers would agree that this is a Good Thing.
In response to the new poll I saw this comic strip last week and a slight edit to a couple of lines of text would make this perfect! http://thedoghousediaries.com/3492