Carbon Neutral Blogging

I struck up a friendship with the chick in charge of social media at World Vision Australia, Richenda. Completely in love with what she and her team are accomplishing, I offered my services and help in any way I could. She asked if she could do a conference call with me, I said, sure!

Any conference call ever makes me nervous. Sitting in the supermarket carpark one day and waiting for the call to come through, I thought, who's dumb idea was this! Oh - mine.

I answered and we were chatting away. Then she mentioned that all these other people were in the room .. that they all read my blog and wanted to say hi.

"Oh ... you all read my blog? Well now you know how completely batshit crazy I really am. How's it hangin'?"

And we all laughed and I just stopped being all pretendy official. Doesn't suit me anyway.

A few days later I emailed Richenda and she emailed me back laughing, saying that because of the "offensive nature" of my email, Worldvision had censored it. (It was just the word 'shit' ... geez, Worldvision, loosen up.)

So lucky for them they get to work with such a professionail blogger.

Thing is, I ADORE seeing works for good manifesting online. See the World Vision ad over in my sidebar? Somebody asked me last week how much do I charge them for it and I was aghast. Nothing! I just put it in there to spread the word ... you're allowed to do that with your sidebar if you want!

Before that I used to just google a cool image of a charity I like, like Amnesty or Red, and then link to it. Totally make my own ads up. For free, to make myself feel good. Stick it to the man ... whoever the man is.

You can put things together like this:

                                       http://www.amnesty.org.au/

                                      http://www.one.org/international/

                                         http://www.rspca.org.au/

Anything at all you feel strongly about or believe in.

Do I think somebody will actually click on that Worldvision link and sponsor a child based on that ad being in my sidebar? Maybe not ... but maybe just raising awareness of an issue can call people into action, later on down the track.

Worldvision have even made up buttons for bloggers complete with html code HERE

They're pretty cool.



Yesterday in the post I received this hand wash from a PR agency:

The founder of the Child's i Foundation, Lucy Buck, quit her TV job after burying a baby boy called Abraham who died of meningitis at just 16 weeks. She works full time for the foundation ... making a goddamn difference. I am flat out minding my own boys .. but I can certainly write about this Trilogy hand wash on my blog complete with pics and a link. It's not much, but it's at least something. It's sold through Priceline, Myer and chemists for $19.95 and Trilogy is donating ALL the sales of this handwash to the Child's i Foundation for the entire year of 2012.

Props for Trilogy .. and my GOD it is beautiful stuff.

The same PR also kindly sent me some hair stuff, which I won't blog about because .. I don't want to.

This post is to raise awareness of stuff that means something. It's also to clarify certain rumblings regarding my motives. My motivation, online and off, remain remarkably kind of genuine. I know it's hard to believe, but some people in the world actually give a shit.

I'm just bumbling my way through life as best as I can. Any decision to start working with sponsors and advertisers more these days is based on a financial necessity for me right now.

I'm not saying I'm a fricken saint - I'm still an arsehole. But I'm an INSPIRATIONAL arsehole.

You gotta give me credit for that.


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