The biggest celebfest of the year!

No glamorous dinner, no champagne, no red carpet arrivals. How can an event on Monday be the biggest charity celebrity event of the year and what attracts some of the biggest names in sport and showbiz to turn up?

The answers, in reverse order, are US$10,000,000 and the BGC Partners annual charity day. Since the events of 9/11 the company has chosen that date each year to raise money for a number of charities by donating its global trading profits from the day. To get a feel for the event check out the video below.


BGC Charity Day 2009 from BGC Partners on Vimeo.

Jenson Button has been promoting the event and his support of it.  You can hear his interview with talkSPORT radio here.  They’ll be reporting live from the event throughout the day.

It’s a huge ask and some charities will be taking a large number of celebrity supporters. There are a lot of charities, 26 in the UK and a total of 56 worldwide, but even so that’s a huge amount of money for each charity and one can understand why they would make the effort.

In general you get a limited number of ‘asks’ per year and it’s important to not over work your celebrities but the amount of money involved here absolutely justifies using up one of your precious ‘asks’.

However it’s important to be sensitive when you’re linking up with corporate partners and to think about whether the income from the partnership is worth using up an ‘ask’. I know of one meeting with a potential corporate partner which was only going to guarantee the minimum level of income but wanted us to get a huge international name to be involved. As I’ve said before in ‘Charidee = free slebs’ charities are not a cheap way of getting celebrity product or brand endorsement.

Clearly that’s absolutely not the case here. It’s all about engaging and encouraging the staff of BGC to make as much money as possible – which they do in copious amounts.

Curiously 4 miles away, in the City, Deutsche Bank staff are selecting three charities of the year from a shortlist of seven. One of the charities that stands a chance of sharing in a pot of what’s likely to be around £1.5m is War Child – a small charity with a big voice. At lunchtime today they had Fran Healy, lead singer of Travis, busking to encourage staff to vote for War Child.



I always think involving celebrities in pitches like this is a more difficult decision since you’re using up one of your possible requests on something which may result in nothing. Having said that it is extremely generous of him and I can see why they would make an exception in this case. It’s a staff vote (so hopefully there are a lot of Travis fans amongst them!) and also the amount of money is huge. In its 2008 figures War Child's turnover was £1.6m so an extra half million would make a huge difference to the organisation.

Never look a gift horse in the mouth!

Sometimes you have to know when an opportunity has dropped in your lap and make the most of it. It doesn’t happen very often (I think it’s happened to me two or three times in a large number of years) but when it does, spot the opportunity, and, if it’s a news opportunity, turn it around straight away before it loses its news value. You know what they say, today's news is tomorrow's chip paper.

Sheridan & Enid

In this morning’s Independent Diary was this story. Radio1 listeners, facebook fans (there was a find Enid page) and those in the twittersphere were already aware that Enid, the dog of Legally Blonde star, Sheridan Smith, had gone missing. As a pet owner myself I know just how traumatic this can be.

Yesterday the missing Enid was found and reunited with Sheridan at Battersea Dogs and Cats Home. What’s more the home has now micro chipped Enid. Sheridan has tweeted her thanks to the home and recommended that all dogs should be chipped – something which the charity advocates.

Sheridan's Tweet

What’s disappointing is that there’s no mention on the charity’s website, no press release, no photo of the happily reunited Sheridan and Enid and, as the charity has no twitter feed, no opportunity to re-tweet. They do have two daily tweets but these are specifically about a cat and a dog available for re-homing.  Neither re-tweeted Sheridan’s story.

I am aware there are issues of confidentiality with those that use a charity’s services but this was in the public domain, so that wasn’t an issue. It would have been a great opportunity for a good news story.

I’m sure they will be thinking about approaching Sheridan in the future but this would have been a quick easy win. It’s the sort of story (celebrity, good news & cute dog – see the pic above) I can imagine the tabloids picking up on and would have given a chance to add in the microchipping message – especially as the Daily Mail had already mentioned that the dog was missing.

When it comes to celebrities remember to KISS!

I don’t mean the luvvie style kissing, although that’s often good as well, but the “Keep It Simple, Stupid!” principle; or as Johnny Mercer once wrote:

“You've got to accentuate the positive

Eliminate the negative

Latch on to the affirmative

Don't mess with Mister In-Between”

Any excuse for an Oscar nominated show tune on a Friday afternoon. What better than a bit of Bing and Bette!


In general the best results always come from minimising the amount of time you need from a celebrity but maximising the benefit from that time.

A terrific example is Christian Aid’s use of the world’s funniest Iranian comedian, Omid Djalili for their Quiz Aid fundraiser. He’ll be hosting his own hour long virtual quiz on Twitter next Monday via his Twitter account which means they’ll be reaching nearly 29,000 who can play along and get the message about Christian Aid at the same time. What’s particularly great about this is that whilst Omid’s doing it from Chritian Aid’s head office, he could be doing it from anywhere – even on the sofa at home in his underwear a la Jim Royle.

In addition to this one hour, Omid has done some radio including BBC 6 Music’s breakfast show and BBC Radio Shropshire. Hey, don’t knock Shropshire, I’ve been there. Well more accurately actually I went through it on the train once, heading for somewhere interesting. Eagle eyed readers who clicked on both links will have noticed that the interviews went out on different days but I suspect he will have done one morning of interviews. What the 106,000 listeners in Shropshire will have been listening to was a pre-recorded interview with Omid in a London studio – the joys of broadcast trickery! It’s also clever to use someone who can appeal to local and network radio audiences which have very different audience profiles.

The half day of radio interviews is a terrific way of reaching lots of people. Working from a single studio in London your celebrity can be on a huge number of radio stations across the country – if you’re lucky you can be doing a different station every 10-15 minutes.

I make that about 5 hours of Omid’s time including the quiz. Whilst I am by no means suggesting that’s not a lot, it’s been set up in a way that is incredibly easy and maximises the value of the time whilst minimising the effort on his part (I bet he doesn’t write his own questions). It also allows supporters to interact with him in a way that just a photo and quote in the fundraising pack never does.

The only pity is that he’s not in the video which is unfortunate because he’d be far more entertaining than this pair of badly voiced sock puppets.



Something like the David Schneider in a crop-top video would have been far more engaging.

J K Rowling, Johnny Depp & Heather Mills

Three big slebs in today’s blogfest! First, splashed across the front page of last night’s London Evening Standard (and in some of today’s papers) was the news that J K Rowling has donated £10 million to Edinburgh University to fund a clinic researching into Multiple Sclerosis.

Without doubt this is a hugely generous gift. But it flags up an important issue. Why do celebrities support causes? In this case J K Rowling’s mother suffered from MS and died due to the disease at just 45. Celebrities are people too and their support is often driven by life experience – just like any other donor. There are thousands of worthy causes but some organisations think that just because they’re a nice fluffy charity saving the whale/cute kittens/starving orphans, that celebrities should automatically support them. Guess what? They won’t.

Let’s be honest. I very much doubt that Johnny Depp would have generously donated £1 million to Great Ormond Street Hospital and supported the charity had his own daughter not been treated there when her kidneys failed due to E coli poisoning.

Not everyone can afford to make these huge donations but their time can be just as valuable. It’s not always easy to research someone’s affinity to the cause, especially if they’ve never spoken about it. I’ve certainly found out by accident that a celebrity I’d approached had a close family member who’d suffered a condition that the charity I represented supported. That being said, making approaches that are relevant will pay off far more often than the scatter gun approach.

What’s interesting with J K Rowling’s donation is that is not via the MS Society. Last year the charity got headline coverage when she stood down as a patron of the MS Society Scotland. What was clearly a strained time within the MS Society got a huge public airing because of this high profile support. A useful reminder that the celebrity can be bigger news than your message and that can have negative as well as positive results. It also shows how important long term relationship management is.

I was reminded of how it can go badly wrong when the lovely people at Red Pages tweeted yesterday that Heather Mills had been announced as Patron of Animals in Need in Northamptonshire. If your celebrity is bigger news than your story, don’t let them near journalists and never, never, let them near live interviews. In 2007 Heather, who was very publicly going through a divorce from Paul McCartney, supported Viva’s (Vegetarians International Voice for Animals) campaign to reduce the amount of meat and dairy we eat in a bid to reduce greenhouse gases.

Having already appeared on GMTV, in what some have described as a rant, Viva booked her on London radio station LBC to talk about their campaign. The full interview can be heard below, courtesy of LBC’s podcast service. The presenter is former tabloid journalist and Express columnist, Nick Ferrari. He generously lets her talk about the campaign but the interview ends in a car crash as he starts asking her about the GMTV appearance and whether she or her lawyers ended their relationship. She ends up terminating the interview. Whilst she got in the key messages they get completely lost and all anyone remembers is the end section. It even got mentioned in the press.