Ian Murray, MP for Edinburgh South, is hosting a Wear It Pink day on 28 October. He’s opted for a baby pink tank top over a pink striped shirt as his wardrobe choice and he’s hoping  schools, colleges and businesses across the UK will choose to ‘wear it pink’ too, with each individual who does, donating £2 to breast cancer research. Around 48,000 new cases of breast cancer are diagnosed annually in the UK, with around 340 men being discovered to have the cancer.

Clothing for Charity days, as they are called in the voluntary sector, are becoming increasingly popular with schools and large businesses and are now starting to feature in small business units too. The idea, whether it’s to dress down in a formal business (solicitors wearing shorts and jeans) or dress up in a casual one (call centre staff coming to work in ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ attire, is to have fun and to raise funds for a nominated charity. Some organisations do this once a month, usually on a Dress Down Friday when staff are allowed to wear more casual clothing if they pay a small ‘fee’ that goes to fund the charity’s work. Others make it an annual event like school children being allowed to wear red to school on Red Nose Day.

It can be a great team-building idea, but it’s important to ensure that your dress code matches the aims of the charity or your good idea can backfire with bad public relations, as happened in 2008 to a major fundraising evening.

The staff of a DHL depot have received an award after adopting an army platoon that was serving in Afghanistan.

The depot staff raised funds through a range of events and workplace competitions which was then used to purchase MP4 players and iPods, magazines, sweets, biscuits and other dry foods and even wholesale casual clothing to help make the lives of the soldiers a little more comfortable.

In 2009, they raised over £20,000 for a variety of causes including the Ava platoon, demonstrating how workplace initiatives can really help, not only by raising funds but by boosting morale and creating relationships that sustain people coping with extreme hardship.

The depot has been granted the Royal British Legion’s Friends of The Forces corporate award for its “extraordinary” work with the soldiers and DHL Droitwich’s Community Liaison Officer said, ‘At the end of the day, you may think you’re having a bad day at the office but it doesn’t compare when it’s hot, you’re getting shot at, blown up and you’ve got sand in every crevice of your body … If all firms could do what we did it would do a lot of good.’

Workplace charity initiatives range from supporting local playgroups by donating leftover paint and paper for creative play through to massive fundraising campaigns by national organisations to fund hospital units or mentoring opportunities offered to individuals ranging from potential athletes to disabled young people to ex-offenders or those recovering from serious illnesses.

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.