There are more ways than you might think to use clothing to raise funds:

1.    Design and print a batch of T-shirts that you can expect to sell – fifty, a hundred or more. Wrap them up, labelled according to size, and sell them to raise funds, by offering a T-shirt lottery. In some of the wrapped T-shirts there will be ‘golden tickets’ rewarding the buyer with a prize. If you can get the prizes donated, you’ll be raising lots of money from lots of people and generating awareness of your cause too.

2.    If you’re an environmental organisation, run a competition that rewards the best use of an old item of clothing – you might see smart shirts being turned into bags, or ties into skirts and so on. You may be surprised at what people come up with, and by auctioning the top ten or fifty recycled items for charity, you’ll raise funds too.

3.    Try and get a famous designer to work for you for free. The ‘Fashion Targets Breast Cancer’ range of T-shirts have brought in more than £6.5 million in the past fifteen years. They were designed by Ralph Lauren to commemorate Nina Hyde, the editor of the Washington Post, who died of breast cancer and have been worn Yasmin Le Bon, Jodie Kidd and Elle MacPherson among others.

4.    Set up a fashion show, offering both young designers and potential catwalk models a chance to strut their stuff, for a small fee, and then get the paying audience to vote for the best designs in a range of categories: formal, casual and party for example giving scope for everything from Armani-style suits to ballgowns to hoodies.

5.    Get a famous person to autograph an item of clothing for you – a polo-shirt with a snooker player’s autograph was recently auctioned, raising £7,000 for a small local charity.

Whether you’re raising money as an individual with a cause you care passionately for, or as a group, or working for a non-profit that needs funding, there are blogs out there that will help you do better with your fundraising. Here are five of the best:

1.    Step by Step fundraising – this American blog aims to reveal fundraising strategies for non profit organisations. It features fundraising ideas that work for many groups — large or small — and for a variety of causes, all of them road-tested by real fundraisers. While not all the ideas translate culturally or legally to other countries, there’s a fantastic array of money-raising ideas that you can explore and that spark off ideas for your own projects.

2.    Fundraising UK is a bit corporate, which isn’t surprising as it’s the blog of a big British Internet fundraising consultancy. Focused on how businesses and non-profits can best use Internet as a fundraising tool it’s a high level insight into web-giving and how it works. Really worth browsing to keep in touch with the fundraising industry and policies that affect it.

3.    Conor’s Fundraising blog – is written by somebody on the inside of the fundraising world, sharing his thoughts and views of fundraising generally – there are some brilliant links here as well as good thought-provoking articles about what works and what doesn’t.

4.    YouthNet has a blog that offers insight into youth issues, volunteering trends and charity from the perspective of the UK charity of the same name – good stuff for the young, good insight for those who hope to attract their attention and interest. Everything from fundraising T-shirts to volunteering in Haiti is covered here.

5.    Be Relevant deals with one of the toughest areas of fundraising – email pitching and e-marketing – it’s an area where most people and businesses fail, and this blog is packed with good ideas on what works, and what doesn’t and why.

Some students aren’t the best at theory, but really shine at practice – and a used clothing shop at Oshkosh West High School in the USA gives the latter group the chance to show their skills.

Students are learning about marketing, economics and retail skills by operating a second-hand clothing store called Vintage Vibes.  Open to students and the general public, it stocks previously owned clothing at very affordable prices and has recently moved from selling casual clothing such as T-shirts and uniform items such as outgrown school sweatshirts into the resale of prom dresses. Students are responsible for running the shop and promoting it through posters and flyers as well as for pricing items for sale.

Most donated items are simply sold and the proceeds go to charities run by the school, but expensive items like prom dresses have the proceeds divided – half of the money goes to a school-related charity and half goes to the person who’s donated the gown. It’s hoped that this will encourage students to understand business better and to develop a sense of corporate responsibility that they can carry with them when they enter the world of work.

If you share a house with a teenager, or work alongside young people, you’re almost certainly familiar with the slogan T-shirt, but did you know that you can tell a great deal about the mentality of a teen from what they wear?

Young teenage girls – from say thirteen to sixteen are particularly prone to personality labelling T-shirts – these contain attitudinal statements, or what we might call ‘behaviour blueprints’ such as ‘Princess’ or ‘Groovy Gal’ – essentially they are a message not so much to the world as to the wearer – psychologists say that this helps a young woman shape her behaviour by reinforcing a message about how she wants to appear. So a girl lacking self-esteem is likely to wear slogans that suggest she’s confident and assertive, to boost her own self image.

Shock tactic tops – what’s interesting about these clothing choices is that they aren’t always T-shirts. Worn by young men more than women, this is often a hoody or long-sleeved sweatshirt that contains a message specifically chosen to shock the older generation. Often blasphemous or at least irreligious, for example a T-shirt showing Mohammed Ali and Jesus Christ in boxing gear squaring up to each other, or Charlotte Church’s infamous ‘Barbie is my crack whore’ this clothing choice is a way of provoking a reaction and – in the same way as the attitudinal T-shirt – helps the wearer to establish a persona, in this case a rebellious one, that separates the teen from their parental influences.

Witty slogans are seen on the well-adjusted teenager or young adult – these T-shirts, bearing messages such as ‘make tea not war’ mash-up the slogans of older generations to produce an amusing and clever new effect. Teenagers wearing this kind of clothing are likely to feel confident about themselves and to have established a place in the world that they feel comfortable with.

It may not be everyday streetwear at the moment, but soon your T-shirt may be smarter than you are – at least on a Monday morning! Seen at London Fashion Week, the new clothing from Cassette Playa looks like plain black T-shirts, but imprinted symbology, a little like a bar-code, means that the garments can be ‘read’ by viewing them through a mobile phone with the requisite app, and then text, graphics and even video can appear on the front of the shirt, and the design can even appear to include hats and hair.

Not only that, but the design function can be programmed so that it cycles through a wide range of outfits each time it’s viewed on the same phone, or simply to changed at a specific hour from day-wear to night-wear! This allows a casual sweatshirt to convert to a smart tuxedo when viewed through the phone, for exampole.

One trainer brand already has Augmented Reality embedded in its shoes, which allows the wearer to access games on the company website, using the shoes as a game controller!

In the world of fashion, AR might be used to show the size, washing instructions and history of the garment – including a map of where the fibres were sourced, the chemical make-up of the dyes used in it, and the distance it’s been transported from field to factory to shop.

And in the workplace, AR clothing might be used to cycle advertising about products, or to carry constantly updated messages about a company’s brand or services. It could be used to show maps of a building so that an individual heading for an interview could ‘save’ the map to their phone instead of having to remember instructions, or in hospitals could be used on receptionist’s tabards to display information about expected delays when waiting for treatment to those sitting in the waiting room. On polo-shirts worn by serving staff it could display the day’s specials instead of printing a menu.

If you’re a new parent, or one who’s feeling older by the minute, there are blogs out there to make you laugh, cry and re-evaluate your parenting practices – but finding the best of the best can take more time than the average parent has to spare, so we’ve rounded up five of the most insightful to share with you:

1 – Bringing up Charlie is a blog written by a Dad – and while the blogosphere seems totally dominated by the superlative yummy mummys of mumsnet etc, there are Dad world’s out there too, and Tim, father of Charlie, shows how the world looks from the father-zone.

2 – Bullying UK is a website that helps both those being bullied and those who bully. It offers resources to parents and to children, so it’s a great place to bookmark and leave for your child to explore on their own, as well as browsing yourself to discover more about the modern forms of cyber-bullying that may be a mystery to you.

image courtesy of firepile at flickr

3 – Build a Better Bento looks like a specialist forum for those using the Japanese lunchbox called a bento, but parents of picky kids will find this a constant source of inspiration and advice (as well as of healthy eating tips) when trying to put together a lunch that will be eaten without tears or threats.  And it may even lead you to buy a bento box or two just to try out the octodog!

4 – Not the easiest site to navigate but still one of the oldest and best for the single parent – Gingerbread has been campaigning for, advising and supporting single parent families since 1918 and still has some of the best links and ideas for those bringing up a child alone.

5 – Holiday with baby does exactly what it says on the tin – it’s a guide to baby friendly holiday resorts and destinations. While there are plenty of places that claim to be child-friendly, many are not baby friendly and some of those that say they like children turn out to be less than well-organised or well-disposed to little people and this site helps parents to choose the right destination and to benefit from a vast range of tips and ideas that help the parents of babies and toddlers to travel serenely and holiday happily.

A 26 year old photographer in Aberdeen is using her talents as both a model and a photographer to help her local Cancer Research UK shops to sell their donated fashion items.

Ali Smith has been fundraising for cancer charities since her mother died of ovarian cancer when Ali was seventeen. Now she’s been able to help the shops promote their clothing rails by working with model Rebecca Tulloch to take pictures of both fashion items and vintage clothing that have been displayed in the shops in the Aberdeen area. The photographs are both studio shots of Rebecca and self-portraits of Ali, in donated clothing such as evening wear, sportswear and casual T-shirts and jeans. Cancer Research UK regional manager Ken Donaldson said, ‘Ali’s shots look fantastic and show there are some really classy items available at bargain prices from [our] shops.’

And Prince Harry’s African children’s charity Sentebale is undergoing a major shake-up.

It was set up to assist 400,000 orphans of HIV-Aids in Lesotho. Now a new Chief Executive is moving the organisation forward after rumoured financial problems led to intense public scrutiny of the charity’s performance.  The aim of Sentebale, which means Forget-Me-Not in Sotho language of Lesotho, is to assist the many destitute children who live in the country.

It is estimated that 15,000 children have the disease, though no one knows for sure and less than 3,000 are being treated with anti-retroviral drugs. Because of the one-in-three adults who have HIV-Aids in Lesotho, boys as young as five may be sent to the mountains to herd sheep alone – they have no access to education and lack blankets and warm clothing. In addition to education about HIV-Aids, the charity provides teachers and books, family planning for adults, and weatherproof jackets and boots and bedding for migrant sheep-herding boys.