Free copywriting - but check the conditions

I've often said I'd rather work for nothing than for cheap, and like everyone else in this business I have on occasion given my services for free to a good cause.

Now though, I'm offering to do this for one person or organisation on Twitter. 

What you get is a full half day of my time, which is enough for a campaign letter, a couple of pages of a website, an email or two, a modest flyer, a bit of editing or an ad to go in your local paper. I charge serious professional rates, so this is worth something. Here are the conditions:

1) You're not in it for the money either. You might be a small disability rights group, a campaigning organisation or an animal rescue - that kind of thing.You don't have to be a registered charity but you do have to have a Twitter account.

2) Your budget really is zero. If you have the money to pay a copywriter, please pay a copywriter. We're worth it. 

3) The offer is limited to four hours of my time. Please don't ask me to write an entire website or your annual report.

4) Think of me as a consultant and my work as advice. Don't ask for a re-write if I begin a sentence with 'and'.

That's basically it. You can find out more about me at www.judyolsen.co.uk or follow me on Twitter (@judycopywriter) and requests should be sent to topcopy[at]mac[dot]com. These don't need to be detailed or complicated - just say who you are, what it is you'd like me to write, and whether or not you already have a draft.

Update: There may be a problem with emails triggering Apple's spam filters. So if you send me an email request, please also send me a tweet so I know it's on its way. 

The deadline for requests is being extended so please feel free to apply.

Turning base metal into...more base metal

A recent radio discussion on what to do with all those spare coppers (money, not lazy bizzies) attracted some amazing texts. Apparently, Britain, you simply chuck your surplus pennies in the bin. That's right, there are people who throw away money. Isn't this the ultimate in conspicuous consumption? 'Oh we have all this money, but it doesn't quite suit us so we're going to throw it away.'

It's not hard to imagine. The perfect house. The smudge-free glass doors leading to the sterile garden. The bowl of grubby coinage that poor people may have touched. Nope, just not part of the dream.

True, these are not people who go to the pub, to have crisp notes downgraded into a trouser-full of change. But they don't use public transport and the Daily Mail is delivered, so their opportunities to offload metal money are limited.

Presumably they're also too thick to understand that this is still money, just in its second least appealing form*.

But for the rest of us, help comes from an unexpected quarter. Lord Sainsbury and his ilk have provided us with special machines so we can convert handfuls of smash into acceptable drinking tokens. And here's how.

In the interests of cutting the nation's few remaining jobs, major supermarkets have introduced self-service tills in their smaller outlets. These tills take cash. You can also part-pay in cash and then switch to a card. For small amounts of change, this is the preferred method.

But let's say you want to buy something costing £5, and have accumulated £10 in change. If you have the nerve (and I do) you can feed your £5 into the machine in any combination of coins you happen to have. Then press 'Cancel Payment'. Do you get your rubbish money back in an embarrassing heap of coins that spills on to the floor? You do not. You get proper money, including notes. You can then feed another £5 of change into the machine to complete your purchase.

Unfortunately you are also doing the supermarkets a favour, by giving them loads of change, and saving them the cost of buying it from the bank. But I think we can live with that.

* Rupert Murdoch or George Osborne, your choice.

The old man and the tree

Behind this street there's a smaller street that runs at 90 degrees. So our kitchen looks out over their long back gardens.
In the third garden along there's a rather fine tree. But the man who lives there hates it. The first sign of spring round here is when he gets out his ladder and hacksaw. And today is the day.
Each year he climbs into the tree and prunes it hard. His wife watches from a faded plastic chair. Then he takes the branches into the lane and burns them. Each year the man's hair gets a little more grey and the bonfire in the lane gets a little bigger.
I imagine their conversation.
'It's the wrong time of year, you know. You should prune this tree in the summer.'
'I know what I'm doing.'
'You're pruning too hard. You're making it grow bigger. Look at all the shoots from last time.'
'I know what I'm doing.'
He's looking thin and bent. This may be the last year he climbs the tree.

Everyone forgets...why they were sh*t-scared

With one of the kids doing a school project on JFK, we asked my partner's dad for his 'where were you when' memory.

It turns out he was on duty as an air traffic controller, in the tower at Prestwick Airport. Someone heard a BBC news bulletin on the radio in the airport lounge, and John used the emergency phone to call the USAF on the other side of the airfield and see if they knew anything. (They didn't).

With the Cuban missile crisis fresh in their minds, they all thought that the Russians had shot Kennedy, and that nuclear war was imminent. John's wife Shirley - alone in the house with four very young children - was terrified.

So for some people at least, the power of that iconic moment was less about the Zapruder film, and more about thinking you're about to die.

Cleaning out the cage

Like a selfish child with a new pet, I lavished attention on this blog when I first started. Then my attention was distracted - hey, it happens - and well, I just lost interest.
Fortunately, unlike hamsters and guinea pigs, blogs don't die from neglect. So time to clean out the cage, buy a few fresh carrots, and start scratching its tummy again.

Up to his elbows in it

Rising food prices, rocketing energy bills, endless tax hikes, static incomes - there must be an easier way?
Well of course there is, and Drew Rozell's the guy to show you how.
Just buy the book, sit back, and squadrons of smiling piggies will bring you piles of money. That's squadrons of flying piggies, can you see them? Aw cute!
Drew would like you to know that he's 'smart enough to earn a Ph.D. in psychology from Syracuse University', but was struggling financially until he became conscious of money and invented a complex money management system involving 'multiple online bank accounts and the power of the internet'. How original is that!! A hideously complex web of virtual money without all the trouble of becoming a drug dealer. Everyone at Croc Towers is impressed.
And there's more. Just $29.95 brings you more than the book - there's a whole package of extras including "A Happy Pocket Full of Money" by David Cameron. Few people have happier pockets than David Cameron, leader of the Tory party- and he explains how to attract money using quantum physics, so it just has to be the same guy. I'm reaching for my credit card, which of course I don't need - but just this once Drew, is that OK?
Hey ho. In case you've missed all those subliminal messages (surely he's doing it on purpose?) the piles of money belong to Drew.
A man who signs his name with a little face.

Credit Crunch

"Credit crunch claims first Scots jobs", says this morning's Scotsman. "Last night there were fears that the moves were the start of a series of cuts that could lead to as many as 5,000 financial services jobs being lost in Scotland."
So what's actually happened? Well, HBOS is cutting 92 jobs from three corporate banking teams. Some of the personnel will be redeployed, and of the rest, half are based in London. We're told that HBOS has 1,000 people beavering away in its corporate division, so 92 is fewer than 10%. Meanwhile Aberdeen Asset Managers is cutting costs by £15 million, claiming the cuts will mostly come from natural wastage and are a "natural part of the cycle".
Apart from all that 'natural' stuff, which makes the Croc feel a bit queasy - this is finance not yoghurt after all- that's not an unreasonable explanation. Especially when it only takes a couple more clicks on the virtual Scotsman to discover that £15m is about a third of AAM's pre-tax profits for the last six months and they've just bought Goodman Property Investors for £130m.
Which brings us neatly back to the HBOS jobs, some of which happen to be in acquisition finance. Global finance is a complex subject to say the least, but it is hard to see how a crisis in inter-bank lending and general liquidity can be blamed quite so directly for specific and limited job losses in another part of the forest. AAM paid cash for Goodman, which it got by issuing shares. And there are plenty of other ways companies buy other companies, few of which involve the use of a credit card. Yes, the economy is teetering on the brink of economic downturn: but recession means two successive quarters of negative growth and we're nowhere near that yet. Yes, house prices are slipping, but everyone and his dog knew they were stupid and unsustainable (apart from people with stupid and unsustainable BTL portfolios, whose dogs think online poker is a good career option). Sure, it's harder to pick up a cheap mortgage, but does that mean the whole of corporate Britain is going to curl up in the fetal position with its fingers in its ears, singing na, na, na? Apparently not.
"Last night there were fears" is one of those lazy journalistic devices that neatly sidestep the issue of who said what. Quite often the person experiencing the specific terror is a man in a pub, a journalist's mum, or, in the last resort, a drunk at a bus stop. All of whom have good reason to worry. But in this case, the Cassandra is named as Douglas Adams, 'an economist at the Ernst & Young Scottish Item Club'.
Now I'm not saying that the credit crunch will have zero impact on Scottish jobs in general and the financial services sector in particular. And I'm not one to trivialise the impact of anyone losing a job. But normally such trimming of staff would hardly raise a ripple, and to flag it up as the first trumpets of impending doom is surely a bit of a stretch.
But this Adams bloke made the link himself didn't he? Well no. Dougie (as he apparently prefers to be known) does seem to have said that 5,000 financial sector jobs might go, but the Croc can't find the actual report on the Item site and is too lazy to phone their press office. He also seems to have tempered his comments with a lot of on-the-one-hand-and-on-the-other type stuff. And the Item forecast for Scotland in 2008 considers evidence that that the downturn in financial services actually predated the credit crunch.
Who then made the terrifying connection between slightly shorter queues at Starbucks and sectoral meltdown?
My money's on the drunk at the bus stop. I've heard he used to be a journalist.