Everyone's a winner

I am the National Lottery's PR dream. When the big blue hand jumps out of the television and tells me "It could be you", I believe it. I even enlist the help of my three-year-old son to pick the numbers, on the pretext of it being an educational game. And while we have not stooped to simulating the event with a tumble-dryer and ping-pong balls, we have made good use of car number-plates and bits of paper in a bag. But the fact that you are reading this is evidence enough that our tactics are failing. Still, winning the jackpot, appealing though that is, is not really the point of the Lottery anyway. And one thing that is failing as much as my ability to win is the ability of those responsible to get that message across. That the person on the street has no idea where the £1 goes or what "good causes"are being funded by the Lottery is a PR disaster.

Critics argue that the Lottery is in decline, and its glory years are behind it. Whether that is true or not - and Camelot, which runs the Lottery, disputes it - many extra games have been introduced. The trouble, for anyone other than the habitual player, is that it is now hard to find the right bit of paper to mark your numbers on.

To address the public's lack of awareness, the Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell, last year launched the National Lottery Blue Plaque scheme. On the premise that it is important for the public to be able to link the game with the projects funded by it, every Lottery beneficiary was to be awarded a plaque. Just like the English Heritage plaques of the same name, people would be able to see them as they walked past. But when we conducted our own small survey of passers-by, no one had heard of the scheme, let alone seen a plaque, and very few could name one beneficiary.

Evidently, something has to change. One possible answer is involving the public more in the decision- making process to ensure the funding goes where the public wants it to. This is particularly pertinent when there are growing concerns over the government's control of Lottery money. Ahead of official legislation, the New Opportunities Fund and the Community Fund have become the Big Lottery Fund. It is too early to see what effect this will have on funding, but the charity and voluntary sectors are very worried that their open approach to funding will disappear and that "PR sensitive" projects, such as those involving asylum-seekers or prisoners, will lose out.

The media attack on these projects is extremely detrimental to the Lottery. In the huge amount of applications for funding, it is easy to find a murderer-turned-poet who has won funding at the expense of an impoverished war veteran. But the media hostility detracts from the enormous amount of projects that have been funded from the Lottery's purse - projects that create amazing resources, and whose benefits also reach the areas of health and education for which the government would love to be using the money.

You have to be in the game to win the game. But remember, as you are hiding your ticket in your underwear or waiting for a bird to poo on your head (this is apparently lucky), that the game is also a question of public rights, and anything that threatens them should be cause for alarm.

Natalie Brierley, supplement editor