In a new approach to cancer prevention, the major British charity Cancer Research is working with Bauer Media and the Asos clothing retailer in its SunSmart campaign.

This is an annual campaign run by the charity, that focuses on teaching young people (between the ages of 16 and 24) the risks of sun cancer and how to protect themselves while still having a good time in the sunny weather.

The fashion input is an online ‘tool’ that Asos have developed – it provides fashion and clothing advice to the user, based on their skin type, the current weather forecast and the event for which they want to choose an outfit. To encourage fashion aware young people to use the tool regularly, they are also being included in a weekly draw – the winner of which receives £100 of vouchers to spend in Asos.

The tool is also being promoted in magazines and on the radio.

Workplaces could use a similar technique to promote safe sun use in their employees –because clothing such as a baseball cap is a great way to protect skin from too much UV exposure. One technique might be a simple chart in the reception area or cafeteria or near the water cooler that shows the weather forecast for 48 hours ahead and lists sensible work clothing to deal with the weather conditions.

Buying clothing online is a great way to save money, particularly if you can buy in bulk, for a sports group or children’s club, but it can also be a little daunting at first. Here’s how to make the best decision and buy the best bargain:

Buying for yourself

•    Before you begin to browse, get a good friend to help you take your own measurements – you need to know your chest, waist, hips, arm length and inside leg (which is the length from your crotch to the hem of your trousers) in both inches and centimetres. If you’re a bit shy about your inside leg – find a pair of trousers that are exactly the right length and comfortable in the fit, and measure them!

•    When you’ve got your measurements, browse the various styles and sizes offered online, because different manufacturers offer different cuts and styles and working out which suits you best can ensure your clothing looks great.

•    When you’ve found an item that suits you, why not order several different colours at the same time to avoid paying extra postage? If you get free shipping when you spend a certain amount this can essentially mean getting ‘free’ clothing instead of paying for postage.

Buying in bulk

•    Ensure you purchase from sites that give loads of pictures, and detailed information about size, fit and colour. The more you know about the clothing, the better informed your choice will be.

•    It’s a good idea, when placing a bulk order, to contact the retailer by email or phone explaining what you require and what your current first choice from their offering would be. Sometimes the retailer can offer you a better deal or simply point you to a garment that you had overlooked or disregarded – because they deal with so many people, online retailers have a vast experience of wholesale clothing purchases, how they are used and what works best for the buyer.

•    Make sure you know how the return policy of the retailer works – if you’re buying for a group you’re taking responsibility for ensuring that if you need to send stuff back, you aren’t going to incur a fortune’s worth of costs.

•    Check the privacy policy and online purchasing policy – a good online shop will have a secure system to keep your credit card details and personal information safe, and will also give you the chance to opt in, or out, of marketing information sent by them or by others.

There are thousands of businesses that aren’t on the high street and can’t afford the kind of publicity that’s necessary if you’re to compete for the attention that the big name stores and services get.

However, if you think laterally, you can find ways to boost your company profile without having to invest in costly advertising. By offering services – or fun – that just aren’t available in the big stores or through stuffier service providers, your business can build itself a niche location in the hearts and pockets of consumers.

Focus on the fact that money is tight for everybody, whether it’s an individual who’s experiencing the credit crunch or a company with a squeezed budget. Offer a service to those customers that makes them feel really valued – give each person who spends over a certain amount a free foot massage. Just hire a Beauty Therapy student from the local college to give the massages and put them in a T-shirt advertising your store. For service businesses, this is a great way to reinforce your brand, as it offers a chance for your therapist to go to the workplace of your clients, wearing your branded clothing.

Alternatively, have an in-store service that allows kids to decorate a simple white T-shirt using fabric pens, while their parents shop. Charge a nominal amount for this or offer it free on a single weekend in the year. Again, hire somebody with suitable training in childcare to supervise the kiddies – this builds brand recognition too, at very little cost. Given the ‘pester power’ that children can indulge in, getting them to like your company may be one of the best investments you can make.

Clothing can be used to educate, inform or even raise funds:

Campaign Clothing

On Friday 26 March, people in the greater Cleveland area chose to wear a custom printed T-shirt saying “HIV Positive”. The shirt-wearing phenomenon was recorded on  Facebook as an attempt to get everybody with whom the shirt-wearers came into contact to think about what it means to have HIV or AIDS and how the rest of the world reacts. The shirts were designed to challenge the silence and shame that descends on people who are HIV Oositive or have AIDS. The AIDS taskforce director said, “We don’t stigmatize people who have prostate cancer. Why HIV?”

The campaign began with a small wholesale order of 100 T-shirts but in the end, more than 500 were purchased by individuals who want to demonstrate their support for those who are dealing with the disease. It is hoped that the campaign will spread across the globe, the cities of Chicago, Toronto, Atlanta, and Columbus have already expressed interest in running their own HIV Positive T-shirt day.

Kids in Business

In the past few weeks, children up and down the UK have been taking part in the Make Your Mark with a Tenner challenge run by Enterprise UK. Essentially they are lent £10 for a month, which they must use to make as much money as they can. The idea is to inspire young people to make a profit and make a difference to the community at the same time.

In Sheffield, four ten and eleven year olds got together to pool their ten pound stakes in a joint venture: Sonny, Emily, Bethany and Holly combined a lunch-break juice stand with an offer personalise classmates’ PE shirts. They printed names and celebrity images like Beyonce and Steven Gerrard onto the polo-shirts. It did cause them some problems, working out how to write the names backwards so that they printed forwards – and once they spilt some juice on a shirt, but overall they made a profit of £72 which they are donating to the relief effort in Haiti and the Tickled Pink breast cancer charity.

There are dozens of ways to customise casual clothing – here are four of the best!

1.    Print it – if you want a customised polo shirt or sweatshirt, you can make your own iron-on transfer or use a custom site to make a one off top with your preferred photograph or graphic on it. If you’re printing more than two or three, it’s often cheaper to buy a new T-shirt from the site and have it printed, than to customise an old one.

2.    Bleach it – if you add bleach to a coloured but otherwise plain T-shirt using a cotton bud, you can get some intricate designs. You can even mash up an existing design by adding your own bleached elements to it – this works really well for words which end up having a great graffiti feel to them.

3.    Cut it – this works best with a big old T-shirt that has extra room so that you can make the ties without it being too constricting. First lay your teeshirt flat. Cut away the seamed edge of the neckline (including the tag) and then trim down the neckline to your preference. You can keep trying it on and snipping away until you like it. Then simply slice right down of the back of the T-shirt – you can mark this with chalk before you cut to keep it very neat. Then make a shallow snip in the top two edges by the neckline and use that to tie the neckline together. Repeat this process  with the bottom ‘corners’ and then tie the T-shirt. This is great for wearing over a swimming costume or bikini.

4.    Sew it – even the most inept person can add beads to the sleeves or hem of a T-shirt or to the pocket of a cotton shirt. Remember that this kind of treatment does make it more difficult to washing your garment though.

Fund-raisers across the UK and USA have been developing new ways of getting money out of the public – via the toilet!

In the USA, Relay for Life, painted some toilets bright purple and used them to inform the public and raise funds for the American Cancer Society.  What happens is that the toilet turns up (along with its minder) outside your house or place of work. To get rid of it you have to made a $10 donation which you place in the toilet bowl and the toilet then ‘flushes’ itself out of your vicinity. If you give it a larger donation, it will relocate to an address of you choice and loiter there instead! The toilet is accompanied by a purple T-shirt wearing Relay For Life volunteer who then visits the office or knocks on the door you’ve selected and tells the recipient ‘you’ve been flushed’!

In the UK, CORD established a Toilet Twinning campaign that raises funds to build toilets in Burundi.

So far nearly 900 latrines, each for a family of six, have been built meaning that more than 5,000 individuals now have a hygienic and private toilet. The donor gets a framed certificate to hang in their own toilet, which gives the number of the latrine they twinned with, and the grid reference in Burundi so that it can be found on a map. Toilet twinning costs £60 and is proving to be a popular option with small companies that want to support a charity that is achieving practical change for the world’s poorest people.

A number of stars have removed their clothing for charity. The calendar features a range of people we usually see with their clothes on, from Apprentice contestant Kate Walsh to former Strictly Come Dancing contestant Camilla Dallerup and athletes like Sol Campbell and Jimmie Anderson. Even veteran actor Christopher Biggins has stripped for the Cancer Research UK campaign which is called Give Up Clothes For Good and is designed to encourage the public to empty their wardrobes to raise funds for cancer research.

On the other hand, giving clothing to charity isn’t without risk. Robbers are raiding clothing banks and stealing donations meant for the poor in Wiltshire. The Salvation Army clothing banks have been broken into several times in the past month and large amounts of casual clothing have been stolen.

Many companies are also getting into the corporate clothing giving scheme – whether it’s putting a clothing bank in the car park to encourage staff to donate their old clothing or investing in simple uniform items such as wholesale T-shirts and then asking staff to gift aid to a charity the money they’d otherwise have spent on clothing for work.

International charity Oxfam has partnered with magazine producer IPC Media. The charity is giving away copies of the music magazine NME in their shops in return for donations. The slogan is swap ‘old music for new music’ and encourages the public to bring in unwanted items from their music collection (records, cassettes and CDs) and take away a free copy of the re-launched magazine in return. It’s the first time a national monthly UK publication has been given away free for charity but the charity did previously work with The Arctic Monkeys, selling the group’s singles in-store.  

And in Sheffield, a charity football match in honour of soldiers killed in Afghanistan has received a donation of sports clothing.

Local company Pyramid Carpets has donated the football strip for the players who are current and former members of Third Battalion The Yorkshire Regiment to wear. The red and blue strip has the logo of the armed forces charity Help for Heroes over that of the carpet store. The match aims to raise funds for injured soldiers from Britain’s current conflicts.

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.