With all the ‘occupy’ stuff I’ve been wondering if in fact I am in the top 1% for income in the world. I’m on £34,500 right now and that puts me in the top 1.22% so I’m almost there. This is how I figured it out. Thanks to my Dad and Clive Andrews for some of these links.

1. Adjust your income for inflation to see what your income was worth in the year 2000. Use this ‘lump sum’ inflation calculator tool for that. This put me down to  £25,368.
2. Use this Global Rich List tool (which is based on year 2000 world bank data, which is adjusted to account for differences in cost of living around the world, and is based on household surveys) to see what top % you’re in. I got 1.22%.
3. Not only does it tell you what % you’re in, but it tells you how many people in the world are richer than you are. I got 73,781,538 people.

I’m sure there’s holes in these tools and methods but I also don’t think they’re massively far off. I also don’t think the solution is to give lots of money to charities dealing with the symptoms of a broken society. I think we need to support charities or organisations that are focused on changing the structure of society to make it fairer, otherwise nothing will change in the long term. That is, revolutionary organisations, and those working to raise awareness of the issues.

There’s also a really neat data visualisation tool where you can customise the dataset here. Here you can see how wealth distribution has widened over time, and how different countries differ.

This is also interesting, by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, to see where you fit as a household, in the UK. I got top 19%. You can use this salary calculator to calculate your income after tax.

So I know that Google searches are now personalised, based on your previous search history. But the recommendations it makes in the predictive text as you type a search, are also fed by what the world is searching for. This was used in a campaign about the racism against Romanians, as Google predicts ‘stupid’ as the word most commonly search for after ‘Romanians are’.

In this vein, I wondered what other interesting things could come up. Here’s some examples, which I realise might be influenced by who Google thinks I am…

1. I/we think about time, work, money and the meaning of life.

2. I/we wonder about the science of the sky, and are generally pretty tired

3. Apparently I/we care about finding Chuck Norris. I really, really, don’t.

4. I’ve never searched for any of these things either. So that must be the world’s fault. So people care about some TV show, work (again), basic maths and being fat. That’s depressing.

5. The only one I might be responsible for here is ‘what is my ip’. So everyone else is trying to find a car and a hifi, and needs a watch.

I’m stopping now because the results are just annoying me. Searching ‘who’ suggested ‘who is in I’m a celebrity 2011′ as the top result. Really, world? Really?! Is there any hope for humanity?

I’ve been blogging, but not here. Here’s the posts I’ve written on my work’s blog. Click the titles for the full articles.

Engaging Networks’ #spark11 conference for non-profits

On Tuesday 14 June 2011 I attended Engaging Networks’ Spark event in London. Engaging Networks is the new name for Advocacy Online – the supporter engagement software that allows organisations to manage fundraising, campaigning/advocacy, email and social actions in a centralised platform.

Audience research – getting to know your Facebook Fans

We all know that the better we know and understand our audiences, the more likely our communications with them will be successful. If we’re already talking to people on Facebook, what do we know about who’s listening? Facebook Insights tells us the age and gender of our fans, and where they are, but nothing about what interests them. We can look at what content we put out and see what is the most engaging, but how would we know what we’re missing? Also, how do we know how different our fans are to the average Facebook user?

NixonMcInnes adopt Unison model workplace policy on domestic abuse

It’s world mental health day today, so I thought I’d blog about a related bit of recent NixonMcInnes news.

Last year I went to the Feminism in London conference and also to a seminar on women’s rights at Socialism 2010, and while there I learnt why domestic abuse is a workplace issue.

Victims of domestic abuse are likely to be affected in ways which affect their working lives – they may need to take time out of work, e.g. to visit a healthcare professional for physical or mental health reasons and their ability to deliver their actual work may be threatened – as such, workplaces need to take active steps to make sure they are not going to inadvertently discriminate against victims.

Current themes around social media and fundraising

Max and I did a presentation last week on the current themes around social media digital and fundraising (well, c’mon, digital is pretty much all social now, right?). Here’s a few of the big ones as we see it:

• Social proof
• Gaming
• Micropayments
• Geo-social
• Fundraising for campaign comms
• Corporate social sponsorship / partnership
• Crowd-sourced products / transactional donations

Happiness vs work

As many of you know, here at NixonMcInnes, in our attempts to prioritise people before profit, we measure happiness of the workforce.

As every ‘normal’ business should, we also measure how much chargeable work we’re doing.

I wondered – when we have tonnes of work to do, do we get stressed and unhappy? So, I mapped the two figures.

“I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim June 2011 as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month”

Then noticed this whitehouse blog post which uses LBGTQ (defined as ‘lesbian, gay bisexual, transgender or queer/questioning’) which is quite interesting…never seen that definition before… (the ‘questioning’ definition of Q). Great that they’re using ‘queer’ properly, shame they define T as ‘transgender’ instead of simply ‘trans’, the latter being inclusive of transexuals and transvestites as well as transgendered people.

Also realised the UN reference “to sexual orientation in a resolution on extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions has been restored.”, in December 2010, which I hadn’t realised. I.e. the UN is supposed to come to your aid if you’re gonna be killed for being LGBQ. (I’m not sure if they will help if it’s ‘cos you’re T).