That's fucking stupid

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Nope.

But it may not have needed saving after all.

We are a day away from the deadline which BullyingUK set as their forced closure date if donations totalling £50,000 were not forthcoming. Donations were not forthcoming even though the 500,000 people that Bullying UK claims to have helped only needed to donate 10p each. I’ve been ‘helped’* by BullyingUK several times, moreso now that they are updating their blog regularly.
Anyway, a rather depressing 5% of their target was raised, enough at their reckoning to keep the charity open another couple of week, but they have decided that hand wringing guilt and emails of support are in fact enough to sustain them rather than cold hard currency.

As the latest update states:

We have decided to continue with our work for the next couple of months while we explore the range of possibilities we have open to us because our goal is to create a sustainable service that can continue helping parents and children across the UK.

Maybe the lack of funds was not as urgent as Bullying UK had led us to believe, maybe another source of cash has been secretly found. Either way I don’t think we’re getting the full story.

For my part I did email the Founder & CEO, John Carnell, to offer some thoughts and advice; I have of course not heard anything back from him but then he’s refused £5000 of fundraising already and refused to answer some pretty straightforward questions about the charity and its work.

I assume you’ve seen my recent post calling you out for your silly threats and attempt at intimidation. Now that we’re past that I have a few serious question which I suspect you’ll choose to ignore but then I do like to give people the benefit of the doubt.

With 9 days to go before the deadline (interested who imposed that deadline but that’s not important) you must be looking at alternatives if the £50k is not forthcoming. Is there a strategy in place to keep the doors open on a shoestring, is the charity going to be mothballed or is it going to close the doors entirely?

£50,000 – Where does this number come from? Your accounts suggest that you get through a little over £70k, is £50k a year going to be sustainable? Is this £50k on top of what you’ve already raised this year? Are you planning on cutting £20k off the budget next compared to 2008 (see below)? Please clarify as I don’t quite get where this extremely round number came from.

Cost cutting – Assuming that £50k is the total you’re needing to keep running for a year have you considered any cost cutting measures and if so, what? Have you considered donations in kind rather than purely cash donations? Send me the tech spec of your hosting requirements as it may be possible to find someone who can absorb the cost of your hosting and so cut your outgoings a little? Same might be worthwhile for stuff like your accountancy fees, have you approached local accountancy firms and asked if they’ll do it pro bono?

Your salary – I’m probably totally the wrong person to raise this but a good chunk of the costs for BullyingUK is your salary (which I’m sure you work really hard for). I would hope that you have considered moving to a voluntary capacity as that could bring the costs down to a more sustainable level, albeit at the expense of service; could your role not be supplemented by more volunteers? As someone who works 9-5 for a company to pay the bills and keeps the charity stuff for my spare time I know that it’s not the ideal solution but sometimes it’s the only one that makes sense.

* It would appear, although BullyingUK refuse to comment, that their definition of helping someone is when that person visits their site for whatever purpose. Even if my sole purpose is to make a donation apparently they are helping me and not the other way round. How comforting.

I have to be very careful with this because the founder and CEO of BullyingUK has already made some quite substantial threats to both me and a friend who is not associated with this site but who works in the third sector.

Below is one of the (redacted because I like to retain some illusion of anonymity) email I received in June after I asked John Carnell to clarify some of the numbers he uses when trying to solicit for donations.

Hello ****, *****

I have to say that I am still really upset about all this and it is likely I will be stepping down from the charity I founded and cared for all these years.

I will be stepping down not because our numbers are in anyway bogus but because I refuse to work in a sector that can be so small minded and vicious as you have shown you can be.

Your “friend” has over stepped the mark time and time again being rude and abusive do you really expect me to reply to abusive tweets from someone who never accepts the view point he’s being offered? He likes to make himself out the victim yet his actions are a million times worse than me ignoring him.

Many of the statements on that site are libellous towards myself and the charity, last night I was ready to wrap all this up thanking everyone for their thoughts and looking to move on, yet I wake up this morning and find your friend using the word cunt in relation to me and him demanding yet more satisfaction. I’m sorry but i think I’ve been more than accommodating.

Give the nature of the libellous comments that are on that page perhaps now would be the time for you both to have a word with him before this matter goes any further I’m happy to bring this matter to a close today.

However if this carries on I will take legal advice to protect the reputation of my work that has been unfairly tarnished by the remarks on that page. This will more than likely require the charities you work with to get involved as they may have data in their access logs that shows who was posting to those pages (if in need any of those posts were done during your work time)

I’m not trying to be a hard ass but I think I’ve taken a hell of a lot more here than anyone else would, speak to your friend and lets see if we can bring this to a close today I for one think it would be wise all round that this matter was wrapped up amicably.

John

This was also followed by:

Hello again

I see from the domain data that ***** is the owner of the site http://www.domainlogr.com/url/thatsfuckingstupid.com

************************Address********************

The Whois data for the domain has been hidden but domainlogr has captured that data when the domain was first registered. I’m more than a little shocked that a fund-raiser for children’s causes [small children's charity] and Banardo’s would own a site like this.

It does now start to explain the motivation behind the attacks on BullyingUK and myself, with Banardos saying they support 100k children a year and us saying we support 500k.

I think you need to move swiftly to repair the damage you have done to me the charity and your own reputations.

We have good contact with Banardos senior team through our chairman of Trustees, I’m sure he will be just as shocked as I am. I still think this matter can be brought to an amicable conclusion with out any further public awareness.

I leave it to you ***** to decide how best to resolve this matter.

John

While the substance of the threats is somewhat comical it was enough to get my mate spooked and as he works for a charity I figured I’d let it drop as a favour to a mate. Since reading through literature on bullying elsewhere on the web I have found that the best way to deal with a bully is apparently to confront the bully and call them out.

So here we go.

Firstly, let’s be very clear about this, the individual posts on this site are the responsibility of the people who write them, don’t threaten or bully a friend of mine for their association with me. I don’t always agree with my friends and I don’t expect them to agree with me all the time so don’t assume they share my views on everything. Just because I have a friend that is an easy target for you does not mean I will be intimidated by your threats.

Secondly, I have finished my current round of fund raising for Barnardo’s and the other children’s charity (I removed the name of that one because it’s not relevant). I would invite John to share this with both charities and they can decide what action they wish to take and I shall decide if I shall be doing future fund raising events for them based on how effectively the money is spent and how they treat their volunteers. I would also like to know what Barnardo’s thinks of the accusations which suggest Barnardo’s has some complicity with these articles.

Thirdly, any accusations or threats sent to this site may be published and the sender asked to back them up. I ask John Carnell to back up the accusations he has made regarding my association with Barnardo’s and I also ask him to back up his accusation of libel towards him and his charity.

With that out of the way I will repeat my question to BullyingUK and add some supplemental ones:

1) You have claimed on numerous occasions (most recently here) that you have provided “help, advice and support to more than 500,000 young people and their families a year”. Please can you back that claim up with a description of your methodology. So far all you have said is that your total unique hits is around 800,000 and you use some undisclosed method to reduce that down to the rather catchy 500,000 figure. Please explain how you quantify if the visitor is a donor or a person seeking help, please explain how you exclude traffic from people curious about the technology you use and how you rationalise that down to 500,000 actual individual human beings who are on the site for the purposes of getting help, advice or support. I’ll repeat that I have visited the site out of curiosity from several different locations yet do not feel I have been helped, supported or advised so how have you filtered me out of your numbers?

I think the question is best summed up by saying: “John, you claim that in the last 12 months there have been 500,000 individual people (about 1% of the total population of the UK) who have gone to the site and received some sort of help, support and advice. Please can you detail as clearly as possible how you obtain that number and how you have accounted for donors, bots, spammers, people going to the site “to see what it’s like”, people who fell for your clickjacking campaign and all the other different types of visitor who are on the site for any number of reasons other than to actually get help, support or advice.

2) In your latest post you claim that “If Bullying UK shuts down, the government will need to provide two fully trained civil servants 24/7, 365 days a year, with an expertise to advise not only on complex education complaints, special needs and school appeal tribunals but to deal with suicidal children, school refusers, children suffering psychological problems and parents involved with social services and the police.”

Please can you justify this statement by:

a) Showing some evidence that the countless other bullying websites cannot provide this service.

b) Provide evidence of formal qualifications held by team members at BullyingUK who provide this support.

c) Explaining if the two civil servants will work shifts to cover the 24 hour period or if they will both work 24/7? I’d also like to know exactly how you’ve calculated this figure because BullyingUK does not appear to have the resources to provide 2 fully trained(?) people on a 24/7 basis.

I wonder how many people outside the geekeratti know about the Streisand Effect? I only wonder because I thought it would be common sense that if you see something embarrassing on the internet the last thing you want to do is draw attention to it; the internet is a big place and stuff gets lost very quickly if you ignore it but stuff also multiplies and replicates quickly if you draw attention to it.

I don’t want to be accused of being a bully but I have noticed that BullyingUK is currently begging for more money to keep their operation going, I can only guess because the founder and CEO & only staff member, John Carnell, has just had a large bill for his iPhone.

The bit that I am trying to work out is how they are claiming to have helped 500,000 children since they started up.  A little birdie* tells me that is the number of hits on their website since they started up.  As they have replied to 8,000 emails it would seem like they have actually only helped 8,000 people since they started because a visit to a website does not always constitute actual help (especially given their history of spamming people through social media).

They have yet to comment.

EDIT (30/06/10): Let’s clarify what I actually asked eh? 500,000 is a bold claim and if it’s based on hits or page impressions or even unique visitors then I’d like to know what was done to filter out from that number the bots, the misdirected and the donors who were on the site not looking for help. As I said lower down I’ve been on your site from at least 4 different IP addresses and from multiple browsers so how do I know you’re not counting me as one of the people you’ve helped?

And really, I am sorry, John, for the cheap shots about the iPhone.

*OK, their own accounts on the charity commission website.