SWEDOW and other new fundraising acronyms?
Howard Lake | 5 June 2011 | Blogs
I’ve just come across ‘SWEDOW’, a recently created acronym relevant to those fundraisers who deal with donated goods. It stands for ‘Stuff we don’t want’, as in inappropriate or unwanted donated items.
I spotted the acronym in the latest issue of Wired magazine, but it looks like it has been around for at least a year, with humanitarian aid blog Tales from the Hood seeming to coin it in its April 2010 post SWEDOW.
Of course the issue has been around a lot longer. Governments do it, dumping out of date medicines on UN agencies, and individuals do it by donating blankets to aid agencies for emergency work when the transport costs alone make them unusable. Charity shops receive plenty of SWEDOW in the form of donated goods of poor and therefore unsaleable quality or simply material that should be recycled elsewhere such as electronic waste.
I like the clunky acronym and think fundraisers should embrace it as part of our ongoing effort to explain to donors that charities know what they are asking for, and are usually equally clear about what they do not want.
What other acronyms does the fundraising sector need that help us or the public focus on a particular issue of giving or fundraising? I’d welcome your suggestions.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.