Now I accept that this blog is going to be filed under the ‘blatantly obvious’ category but just because it is doesn’t mean that makes it any less relevant.

For those that have taken self isolation too far and have been stuck under a rock Captain Tom Moore is the inspirational pensioner, ex forces who chose to raise money for the amazing  NHS Charities who has very sadly just passed away. He hit almost £39m, that’s more than some entire Comic Relief nights, truly staggering with those donations coming from over 50 countries.

I’m not going to focus on the obvious point that if we were all to take a leaf out of Tom’s book in a personal capacity we’d all be better off or indeed the more political point that it shouldn’t have been necessary to prop up our health service and I’d prefer to see an extra 2-3p on income tax for a dedicated health tax, as the moderators won’t be able to filter out the amount of Corbyn based insults I’d receive. No what I’m going to talk about here is how our businesses can be more like Tom.

Now I’m going to deal with an elephant in room here, whilst it is of course not the reason to do charity there’s a beautiful halo effect that often accompanies such activity that will benefit business entities as well. So there’s no point pretending otherwise, quite the contrary when there’s such an obvious win-win with all parties benefitting we should encourage and reinforce the behaviour, because anything that gets more of the good stuff to happen has to be a positive thing.

On the face of it its obvious what Tom did but let’s look at it in more detail, he did something relatively simple, but he did it for the right reason and it caught the public imagination and now he’s getting fly by’s by the Red Arrows. Crucially as well as a lesson for everyone he didn’t start off with the goal of raising almost £40m he started small , his intention was to raise a £1,000 and on attaining each goal he pushed the boundaries. Bite sized iterative goals rather than big moon landing style endeavours that most of the time fail to get off the launchpad.

Everyone knows that very few people have been receptive to prospecting calls at the moment, the precious few that want to still be in that ‘buying zone’ well outweighed by some margin by the ‘are you kidding, we’re in the middle of a pandemic?’. Therein lies the opportunity the very best agents and suppliers have been doing the right thing and reaching out to their local communities or networks just to check everyone’s ok. Believe me those companies that have delivered on their promises will get their just rewards, look at Land & New Homes Network, in the first week of the first lockdown they’d got  cards out to the people of Marlborough checking they were ok and if they needed anything just to get in touch, I know many agents did similar in their communities.

I happen to know that Kev Ellis himself encourages his team to help out when they organise a Xmas dinner for the pensioners of the town as well. Why? Well clearly Kev’s a top bloke, really the good will he’s created can’t really help his business focussed as it is primarily at businesses rather than B2C but I know from my point of view as a supplier and from the many agents that I speak to that sort of stuff counts.

You see what I did there, win-win. They do the right thing, they get bigged up and deservedly so and I’ve got to say on the whole I look back on what the supplier community rose to the challenge last year and so many were them were pro active in reaching out to clients and seeing if there was short term things they could do to help agents through. Truly a case of being ‘In this together’ rather than some bland meaningless political soundbite.

Look lets face it those people who are hard nosed or cynical enough aren’t going to be swayed but you know what, there aren’t enough hours in the day to placate them anyway, to those people that are more in touch with humanity its a big tick in the box and I can tell you now if there was a close tie between L&NG and another provider and I was torn between, then things like this would definitely swing my vote. All for doing the right thing anyway.

The rate of good deeds hasn’t slowed either just because we’re in our third Lockdown, with fund raisers just becoming more and more creative with what they can do. Jamie Aspland with Woody & Scruppsy and the Pygott’s team through themselves into the #BHF100k challenge throughout January challenging dozens of people from their business and rallying support across the industry  they’ve managed to raise over £68k and are still going for the British Heart Foundation, if you do want to support then I’m sure they’d be grateful if you could spare anything here.

Showing how creative this industry is and responding to the real world challenge that many kids don’t have the tech to do proper home schooling the likes of Oliver James, Luke Sinclair and Stephen Brown amongst many others have created the Go Fund Me Computers for Schools initiative and although only just launched has raised over £40k and are delivering hundreds of devices to schools across the country. I can be very cynical but I believe this stuff really matters.

We encourage anyone wanting to arrange a charity to get in contact and we’ll  support where we can on the Kerfuffle site through our events and blogs functionality.  As ever we are passionate supporters of @AgentsGiving probably to be fair to apologise for #Comedygeddon at the ball years back that was definitely DEFINITELY all David Mintz’s fault, its amazing that you guys are doing all these individual acts but you miss the titanic opportunity to make it part of something bigger and raising the profile and publics perception of the industry as a whole, just to clarify because I know there’s some confusion sometimes you can still support whichever charity you want to and they can even sometimes help with fundraising grants.

Hat’s off to you all.