Knowing their stuff........

Having a celebrity talking about your cause can have benefits but comes with dangers. In this studio discussion on The Daily Politics, Pam Ferris shows how it should be done.

Pam is Vice President of the Princess Royal Trust for Carers. What’s important here is that she has relevance, being a former carer, and, more importantly, knows the subject and is able to talk about it convincingly. It’s always a risk putting a celebrity in such a pressured position but if they are thoroughly briefed and have mastered their subject they can be fantastic advocates for your cause.

I have no doubt that this is a relationship that has been developed over a number of years. It takes time to get someone who you can put on a TV sofa and talk eloquently, especially with policy makers – but when you do hold onto them. As I said in “We love you….we love you not….” celebrities go in and out of fashion but people like Pam are rare and worth a fortune.

However there are risks with bringing someone onboard. You are aligning two brands and if one is devalued the other will suffer. The last thing you need is the media coverage to be about your celebrity doing something wrong or a public falling out between the charity and the celebrity.

A classic example is Dappy from N-Dubz becoming an ambassador for Beat Bullying and then appearing to bully a Radio 1 listener with an unpleasant text message. He subsequently apologised for the incident and the charity dropped its relationship with the band. Whilst I appreciate that N-Dubz was a good choice for the charity’s target market, a little research would have made me nervous. According to The Sun he has a conviction for spitting in a girl’s face and Digital Spy had reported he’d been removed by armed police from an aircraft with a band mate as "They were swearing at kids on the plane, being foul and threatening passengers".

It’s fantastic to have celebrity support but particularly where you intend to put someone in front of the media, you need to think very carefully about how well they fit with the charity’s message and how well they will be able to talk about the subject.