Spot The Difference

The Make A Wish Foundation in Ireland helped Joshua be a pirate for the day. He won a cutlass fight with the real John Sparrow. With their help, Erin trained as a knight and stormed a castle to rescue a dog. They've helped seriously ill kids meet Metallica, Ronaldo and Barney. It's hard to read their stories without moist eyes.

In an earlier episode I wrote some notes on a rather different group, the Make It Happen Foundation. A self described charity, the organisation is not on the Revenue's list of approved charities. The director and other members are refugees from Children To Lapland Appeal, an organisation stricken from the list of approved charities and wound up for failing to pay its suppliers.

Some of these munificent members hail from the same original travel agency, bereft of aviation licence for reasons perhaps too lengthy to recap. They earn their crusts by encouraging volunteers to take sponsored holidays. Funds raised are devoted to buying holidays for children, their families and their parents. If the conflict of interest in this rather inefficient model is not apparent I encourage you to read the earlier post.

A new member unconnected with previous enterprises has come to my attention: their marketing development executive, Brian Ó Súileabháin. I'll be spelling his name in Irish - I don't think errors made in the early stages of one's career should be the first thing Google returns, but you can see the English spelling above. Judging by the common spelling mistakes, retweets and times spent online he also controls their Twitter account. He received a rather irate tweet from Bath Marketing:

@brianosullivan6 Remove the content you have copied from my website asap.
— Paul Tagent (@bathmarketing) October 16, 2012

To which he replied:

@bathmarketing I would like to publicly apologize for Sull Marketing Consultancy using @bathmarketing content on our site We have no excuse
— Brian OSullivan (@BrianOSullivan6) October 16, 2012

Those curious will probably fancy a gander at the sites in question. This is Bath Marketing Consultancy. This is the rather hastily (and haphazardly) updated Sull Marketing Consultancy, presumably by its director Brian Ó Súileabháin. Archives are not available (edit: or so I thought - keep reading), but we can get an idea of the copyright infringement committed by Brian by looking at his Facebook page, yet to be updated. For futureproofing here are some screenshots:

Bath Marketing Consultancy's original:

Sull Marketing Consultancy's derivative:

Rather damning and a poor show, I'm sure you'll agree. Edit: at this point I'm indebted to the talented BockTheRobber (comments, below) for finding a cache of the original. Click to view in all its glory. Bock also suggests comparison of the heretofore unseen content with the identical text found on Creative Pod's Marketing Consultancy page.

Coming across this information inspired me to look at the Make It Happen website once more. It contains the following text:

From their front page:

"To commence our work and succeed in our aims, we rely overwhelmingly on the kindness of people like you. Our target for 2012 is to raise funds to the amount of EUR350,000. These funds are hoped to be raised by way of several staged events, overseas walks, runs, cycling etc.,

With these funds ie., your generosity, we can make a real difference to a child's life."

Now let's look at the about page of Make-A-Wish Ireland, an established, reputable charity with Revenue approval. You've heard of them. They make dreams come true for seriously ill children. Here's something from their site:

"To continue with our work and succeed in our aims, we rely overwhelmingly on the kindness of people like you. With your generosity we can make a real difference to a child's life."

Bar some glossy travel brochures and high price tags there's not much on Make It Happen's website. What is there seems to include material plagiarised from Make a Wish Foundation.

I'm not quite sure how to describe such actions. Care to take a stab in the comments below?

Update: Part Three is now available.