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.
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