As is pretty obvious from the title of this blog, words are my business. I spend most of my waking hours choosing them carefully, writing them out, looking back through them, talking them through with colleagues, clients and friends, tweaking an adjective here and an imperative there to (hopefully) produce the perfect copy.

So, when I came across the Adopt a Word initiative that allows you to ‘adopt’ a word for charity, my first thought was, “What word shall I get?” and my second was, “What a great idea!”

I’ve written about fundraising and the importance of a theme/activity that inspires people before, and the Adopt a Word concept strikes me as a little bit of genius. Everyone I mentioned it to knew immediately which word or words they wanted most.

Head over to the Adopt a Word website and you’ll see that this project has plenty going for it: a concept you can get on board with, a worthy cause, celebrity endorsement (lots of), and even merchandise to show off your newly adopted word.

All funds raised go to I CAN, the creators of the project. I CAN is the children’s communication charity, which aims to ensure that no child is left behind because of a difficulty speaking or understanding.

Its mission:

“To make sure that everyone in contact with children knows how important communication is, what a communication problem looks like, and what they can do to help.”

So, the core concept – words – is very closely tied to the charity it supports. The Adopt a Word concept gets prospective donors thinking about words, and realising how much they value communication, which helps to highlight the importance of the I CAN cause – excellent stuff.

Clare Horwood
, Head of Individual Giving 
at I CAN,
 was kind enough to run me through the background to the project:

“Adopt a Word is one of our fundraising campaigns to raise money from individuals. Alternative gifts are a great way for charities to increase their donations, but it’s a fairly crowded market.

“Obviously, we can’t use goats or pandas so words, which are at the heart of our cause and the building blocks of communication were the natural choice.

“By putting words up for adoption we hope to make their importance understood in the context of children with communication difficulties. Also, because words have such a broad appeal it means we can extend our reach beyond the traditional donor and way out into the twitterverse!”

The initiative has been running since October 2008, but recently received a boost when Stephen Fry purchased ‘wordy’, sparking a flood of donations. I think with another push on social media and via more traditional marketing and PR channels, it could receive much wider exposure.

Adopt a Word’s Twitter persona (@adoptaword) is starting to make waves but as with any initiative, there will be areas for improvement and the guys at I CAN are (unsurprisingly) great to communicate with, so I’m betting all suggestions are welcome.

Personally, I have suggested adding PayPal as a payment option and adding a button so that people can push a message to Twitter about their adoption. What do you think?

(Thank you to @reedwords for making me aware of this. And in case you’re wondering, I bought ‘social’)