thirtydegree

Why have you decided to join the Heart Runners team? You may enter up to 1000 characters *

I’ve been looking hard to support a charity whose cause doesn’t discriminate against men or women. I grew up without both my grandfathers, as they both died of heart related disease before I was born. Also knowing young, fit people suffering heart trouble, I feel that this is the right charity for me to support, as heart disease doesn’t discriminate its victims.

I’m a firm believer that a healthy heart leads to a healthy mind. I took up running as my main focus for exercise last year and have run over 800km in 7 months. I’ve discovered a true passion in running and using Nike+ this has been kept fresh through challenges and tracking my progress over time. I also started to notice how much better I feel when I run and it’s the perfect opportunity to clear my head of clutter at the end of the day and week.

How would you aim to achieve your pledged fundraising target (please provide full details)? *

I am going to run a “Tweet my beat” campaign. The tweet with the closest match to my total heartbeats for the duration of the marathon will stand to win an iPod. The tweeter will need to have donated to be considered in the draw. Joint winners will receive iTunes vouchers as an equivalent alternative. This shall be for my personal expense.

My campaign will be focussed towards online social networking – Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and to a lesser extent LinkedIn (for professional purposes), as friends who have run for charity say that this is where they achieve the majority of their fundraising.

Offline, I will be creating awareness to my campaign through my gym noticeboard (Virgin Active) to extend the reach of fundraising. I shall also extend this to friends and family, with Christmas cards focussed on giving to your charity.

At work I shall try a few different fundraising avenues, in the form of an emailer soliciting donations for my run. Closer to the time of the marathon I will also ask for an awareness day in the form of a casual Friday £2. This should be able to bring in £200 and if extremely lucky, a match may be made by the company, however I am not banking on this part. A doughnut donation is another excellent fundraising opportunity at the office.

I firmly believe that through these efforts and putting in 5 hours a week towards fundraising efforts, I will be able to meet my target of £1,500. As this is my first fundraising effort, I don’t want to fall short of my target and make you miss your fundraising target. Obviously the aim is to exceed this target.

This week I was prompted by Facebook to look at their new privacy settings page. At face value it’s a clear and concise presentation of all your current privacy settings. That’s about where the advantages of the new privacy page start and end.

The moment you want to interact with it in any way besides the standard settings, you’re redirected to the original privacy settings page which is where, according to reports, people were struggling in the first instance. For the user, one would expect a one stop shop area where you could adjust your privacy settings and, should you wish, you could customise a setting further by drilling down on a particular setting.

Why did Facebook only display buttons indicating what your settings were set to and not have quickly adjustable radio buttons? One can only wonder. An easily presented, everything in one place, approach would have made users feel more comfortable with their control over who and what can see your information.

Yet again, Facebook’s recommended settings are set to reveal an uncomfortable amount of data with the wider web. When will they understand that average users are only interested in sharing our information with trusted connections. This trust is not instantaneous, whilst accepting a friend request on Facebook is.

When the model aligns to resemble a more familiar way which we interact in the real world, then people may start to divulge more information. This is what Facebook wants, as information is their key in generating revenue from targeted advertising. At least in this incarnation of privacy settings, our custom settings have been maintained and listed as custom.

We can only hope that Facebook listens more to what it’s users want, so that everyone can be happy.