Send A Cow Has A Reputation for Fab Christmas Gift Ideas... Find Out What's Happening This Year!
Send A Cow has a well-earned reputation for coming up with imaginative 'alternative' Christmas gifts, designed to benefit farmers, families and individuals.. They have some new additions to their Virtual Gifts this year! Provide milk, Give a bag garden and Teach water harvesting are among the new gifts you can buy this year! But the charity's VIP and Communications Officer, Laura Martin tells us about their exciting plans for this year and why they are 'turning Christmas on it's head'!...
(PICTURES: SEND A COW'S BUILD A STOVE VIRTUAL GIFT, THANK YOU CAMPAIGN, MORE GIFTS AND LOGO)
What's happening this year?
We have lots going on this year! We have been promoting our new gifts in magazines and got coverage in Countryfile, Elle, Amateur Gardening Magazine plus many Christian titles. We have a new campaign which launches Monday 14th which will be all over our website, Facebook, Twitter and our gift site. This is our new initiative. Ambassadors up and down the country are also doing talks and alternative activities and spreading the word for us.
Are you launching any new present ideas/events/ventures?
Yes! We have the new milk gift - provide milk which at £20 enables families to buy a share of a cow. Also our gardening gifts are always really popular. BBC's Toby Buckland is championing our growing gifts, especially the keyhole garden gift and has talked about us on Twitter and to magazines.
Our main new initiative is our Thank you campaign. We are really turning Christmas on its head this year and at a time when many of us are asked for a lot, we are 
giving something back and aiming to publicly thank as many of our supporters as possible.
We are also going to have five super supporters who we are going to really make a fuss of and they get videos, handmade cards and lots of other secrets soon to be announced! As well as this we are going to be handwriting compliment slips and calling as many of our supporters who buy gifts as possible giving them an even more personally thank you than normal.
If you visit our facebook and twitter and gift and website from Monday you will see what I mean. www.sendacow.org.uk you will see our first super supporter Janet!!
Do you have any special initiatives for schools to get involved with in the run up to Christmas?
Yes we have East African Advent Tree the sheets help make a fantastic acacia tree that will create a colourful wall display. During Advent, your children will learn about Christmas in African countries and do something kind at school or home as hangings are added to the acacia tree.
Why does Send a Cow need our support particularly at Christmas?
You may not know but we were the first charity to pioneer this idea of a Christmas gift catalogue in the UK, ten years ago, we are hoping that by the end of this 
Christmas we would have raised over £10 million from ethical/virtual gifts for Africa altogether.
We rely a lot on the kindness of supporters and it is a very important time for us. We first put together our catalogue on 2001. In 2005 we raised a record £1.45 million in just three months; this was the year that ethical catalogues truly caught the publics’ imagination.
Despite others taking on the idea we have still raised over £9 million through the gift catalogue and it is our single biggest appeal of the year.
What can churches; Christians and individuals do this year to help raise funds for Send a Cow?
We have lots of great fundraising ideas for churches but mostly we have people having Christmas services for us or all signing a big Christmas card and having a collection of the money saved on cards.
How much have you raised withyour recent Harvest Appeal?
We have raised well over £30,000 but many Harvest collections come in from now until the New Year. This year however we had the emergency Ethiopia appeal. Unfortunately for so many in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa more widely, support is 
not there, or has been far too late in coming.