Celebrities receive so many requests to tweet about charities that they have had to develop a coping strategy. The problem with Twitter is that it gives direct access without being filtered by agents.
Matt Lucas (@RealMattLucas) has created a separate account “So because I get lots of requests daily to RT charity info, I have set up a dedicated Twitter account just for that.... @CharityRetweet 1,275,608,814,000.00 via TweetDeck”
Sarah Brown (@SarahBrownUK), a great advocate of Twitter, said yesterday that she “has a personal rule to not RT individual fundraising appeals on Twitter which even extends to @SallyBercow”.
Hassling people via Twitter and then publicly complaining that they haven’t responded is hardly going to endear you to a celebrity with which you do not have a relationship.
Doyen of Twitter, Phillip Schofield has created a guide to using it which can be found on his website. This is his sage advice for charities:
“Charites/endorsements/interviews/personal appearances
I use Twitter for fun and to keep those who choose to follow me up to date with what I’m doing. I don’t look for or want to be offered work here! If you need to contact me professionally please look at the contacts page of this website to make an approach (where we might even say yes!!). Charities are even more tricky. I don’t have the time needed to vet you! That may sound harsh, but with so many followers, sadly, comes responsibility. I can’t endorse a charity, good cause or website that just might turn out to be bogus. I would be mortified if I pointed anyone in the direction of something that was anything but 100% above board.
To that end I’m afraid that I must point you to the contacts page of this website where an official approach must be made for me to get involved with a charity. I must also point out that I’m a patron of lots of charities and at the moment I’m not looking for more. I’m really very sorry, but I hope you understand.”
There’s also a risk involved in asking for a celebrity re-tweet. As the godfather of Twitter, Stephen Fry, (@stephenfry) warns on his website that a re-tweet by him can easily crash a website if you’re not prepared for the interest it can create, as many as 500,000 visits in an hour.
If you have a good relationship with a celebrity then they will talk about your charity as David Schneider (@davidschneider) did for The Prostate Cancer Charity, Coronations Street star Shobna Gulati (@shobnagulati) does for Plan International, Annie Lennox (@AnnieLennox) does for her SING campaign and Amanda Mealing (@meamandamealing) does for Breast Cancer Care.
Most famously Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) went into a race to see whether he could beat CNN to 1 million followers and as a result donated US$100,000 to No More Malaria.
As a friend pointed out “Celebs do things on their own terms. To bombard them with a cold email from a stranger is barely one grade up from spam, no matter how worthy the cause.”
Therefore trying to start a relationship via Twitter is probably not the best idea.
Great post. I too blogged about Matt Lucas's odd decision to create a separate Twitter account for charity retweets. Would be interested in your thoughts. To me, he is missing the point of why people ask him to RT.. http://goo.gl/vmTM Keep up the great blog! :) Rob
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