The knock on effect of an idea. Here is the story of a modest charity collection – told backwards.

Our team collected more than £800 for the Movember initiative, benefiting various charities related to men’s cancers.

The majority of people at work donated money and all of them seemed to be doing so with a smile. We had many comments about our various styles of moustaches – all good hearted and I do believe the whole campaign contributed, in a small way, to office spirit.

A colleague of mine ordered the official Movember collection box and we had a manual collection in addition to the donations we received online.

Pictures of our moustaches were published in the staff magazine and also put on all internal television screens – all to the amusement of less hairy-lipped staff.

I asked a member of our communications team if she could help us to raise some awareness to see if we could collect money for the charity.

More and more colleagues started to sport a moustache and as the collective hair on our lips grew, so did the general awareness of why we were doing it.

A small group of colleagues committed to join me and grow a moustache for the whole month of November after I sold it to them as a novelty and a charitable endeavour.

I decided that since I always wanted to have a moustache, this was the perfect excuse to grow one. And if we received some money, I would be able to justify the hair on my face to my girlfriend and other skeptics under the guise of it being for charity. The perfect cover!

I received a general email directed to some of the men in the office, jokingly suggesting that we participate in the Movember initiative as the sender liked moustaches and would not mind a couple of “Tom Selleck” look-alikes roaming the office for a month.

A colleague of mine read a small article in a magazine about jewelry in the shape of moustaches and that the company selling it planned to donate part of their profit to the Movember cause.

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 Thank you Debbie, because of your small spark, we collected £800 in charitable donations, contributed to a spirit of wellbeing in the office, suffered some well intended ridicule and forfeited the odd bit of “leg-over” due to our partners not being as impressed with our “taches” as we were, but it was for a good cause and a lot of fun. Well done.

Idea 8: Rate your local sex appeal

When I started to ask people about the following idea, there were various opinions about the statistical validity*, how many people you will need to make it work, blah blah blah. But, one thing that there is consensus about is that most people play this game in their heads anyway.

Idea number 8 - Rate your local sex appeal:

The premise of the game is to rate the sex appeal of strangers in an area, using a mobile application.

Under your profile you would enter your gender, age and whether you are straight or gay.

The interface of the mobile application will be simple.

• Two voting buttons; "Would you?" or "wouldn't you?"
• A countdown timer; Users can choose to play for 3, 5 or 10 minutes.
• The amount of alcohol (in units) consumed at the time when the game is played.

There will need to be some controls to ensure the parameters entered are statistically reliable*, of which the key ones to get right will be; (examples at the hand of a heterosexual woman)

• Dismissing scores when the location is too quiet (think deserted island). A score of 1 out of 4 means you only saw 4 men of which you found 1 sexually appealing - too few to base a statistic on.
• Dismissing scores when the location is too busy (think clubbing night). A ridiculously high total scoring means you are seeing too many men at the same time so you might be double counting or not counting all men.

Once you have played it a couple of time you would be able to;

• Compare your own scores, over time, against location - see where are the most attractive people, according to you. 
• See correlations between your scores, alcohol consumption and the time of day.

Once enough people are playing the game, you would be able to;

• Compare your scores to other people's in a given area to decide if you are "picky" or "desperate".
• See infographical "hotspots" in your city or town.
• See how alcohol consumption and time of day influences average scores (testing the Beer goggle theory!)

You can then post your scores and results, like everything else, to Twitter or Facebook.

I am well aware that douchebags and jocks will abuse such an app to a certain degree, but it should not be developed with them as the primary market.

Your thoughts?

* Someone mentioned that you might be muddling the statistical significance by measuring two things at the same time - the player's taste and actual sex appeal of the subjects.