Gallery's £1.6m appeal for Donne -- misses a beat

An appeal to raise £1.6 million to buy a portrait of the English poet John Donne has been launched by the National Portrait Gallery in London.

The 16th Century picture, regarded as the most important painting of Donne, has been privately owned for 400 years.

Current Poet Laureate Andrew Motion said the painting’s "innate qualities" made it "indispensable".

Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4654468.stm

I immediately expected that the National Portrait Gallery of the United Kingdom would have been enterprising enough to have setup a mobile shortcode or at least a paypal ‘donate’ function on their frontpage, especially if this is their new campaign, right?  Not a bit of it.  Well, not that I could see.

This prompted me to write the following to their Sponsorship person, Charlotte.

Charlotte,

I saw the BBC news story today about the appeal to buy the John Donne portrait.  I’m not that into art per se. I appreciate its value in society and that’s the general limit of my interest day to day. However, spurred by the piece on the BBC website, I would quite happily donate £1.00 or even £10.00 if you had a point-and-click button on the frontpage of your website using Paypal (because it’s quick, simple, easy and I don’t have to faff about with credit cards). Or I would have texted the word ‘JOHN” to your mobile shortcode and paid £1.50 to make my contribution. I would have got at least 10 of my friends to do the same. That soon mounts up — especially when you have the sort of media coverage you are able to command.

I’m aghast that in today’s fast paced world, there wasn’t a mention at the bottom of the BBC piece saying ‘text JOHN to 82020 to donate toward the total” or something similar! I hope you’re able to implement something like this soon?

Ah well, I hope they fix this soon.