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.