Pkchukiss – Reality Wine

I hate to write about irony, because it has been hammering me on my head for the past few days: so much so that I’m getting a tad annoyed.

Well, you see: there is this freshmen orientation programme in school this week, and we have this special flag day to sell round stickers to the public to raise funds for the President’s Challenge. The trouble is, the storm around the National Kidney Foundation, and its ex-Chairman’s obsession with golden bathroom taps bought on public charity dollars is still stirring around the heartlands. You could almost hear the bad vibes towards charity in the air, with a very gleeful Singapore Press Holdings (which exposed the entire scandal when Duari sued them for reporting rumours of the golden taps) inking head-liners on the civil and criminal proceedings.

So, I wasn’t really keen to be raising funds for charity at this time – who knows what merciless grilling may come for a measly few coinage? The public is not ready for the plethora of charities that remain penniless after NKF successfully mopped up most Singaporeans’ charity funds. It really is just a zero-sum game, where the rest had fallen behind in the dust.

Nevertheless, I couldn’t forget that the people in need don’t disappear just because NKF sucked up public funds – the poor still need money to pay for food, the handicapped still need to be equipped with aids to level the playing field in this world.

The world won’t stop because people stop donating; it’ll only severely affect the quality of life for the small section of our society that relies upon public assistance. That thought was what drove me to pound the concrete today at Outram Park.

Getting people to donate is really a simple game. First, you need to find a place where people get trapped easily (like a traffic junction, escalator landing, areas near MRT station exits). The aim is to predict a start-stop flow of human passage, so that there is enough time to ask everyone for donations.

Next, you would need to know details of the charity that you are raising funds for. People do ask you for those to make sure you know your stuff.

When working through the crowds, always smile, and look at them in the eye. I find that when I made that effort to personalise the contact, people tend to be more generous. I initially thought that it had something to do with the fact that I was really handsome, but when a mirror told me the truth, I realised that a friendly, personable face is all it takes to get people to pop notes, instead of coins into the collection tin.

The next point was where I figure most people don’t do well in: to ask for the donation. I’ve had some classmates tell me that they are embarrassed to open their mouths, but that is more like being a salesman who shows the customer the product, gives the customer a glass of water, and keep silent by the side. You don’t get a sale if you don’t ask for one. That got proven many times when I could see people passing silent collectors, only to donate into my can when I simply asked them.

At the very end, when we broke the seals to count the donations, I managed to hit $74. Not bad for 4 hours of soliciting, though it could have been more. The rest of my time was spent helping one of my other classmates fill his tin, since it felt very light, and I decided to help him add to his tin’s heft before the stringent scrutiny back in school.

I had a really great time too, when we took a break just outside the MRT station. An uncle, who looked around 40-ish, came around to chat with us. He really had some radical ideas to raise funds, like giving each student a donation card, and going from CBD office to CBD office to get donations. In addition, we found out that he was related to the famous 16-year old violinist who was initially turned down for deferment from National Service to pursue his studies.

An interesting tidbit: his friend was one of the winners of NKF’s charity prizes, winning a condominium, AND car. The media made quite a big story out of that one, so I was surprised to hear about the story from a close source. We learnt that that friend was later blocked from making donations to NKF’s latter charity shows, most probably because of the public outcry over the controversial scooping of both the first and second prize.

That’s controversial alright: the uncle himself looked to be 45, but he claims to be 78 years old. With jet-black hair and buldging muscles, I was wondering whether his entire story was true at all! I leave it to you to draw the conclusions.

[tags]singapore polytechnic, singapore poly, president’s challenge, charity, flag day[/tags]

Filed under: General