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.

                                             

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.

Tweet Off

Last night the Children’s Trust (@childrens_trust) tweeted this:

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.

David Schneider in a crop top - well it is for charity!

I thought this video from comedian David Schneider was terrific.  Posted last Friday, The Prostate Cancer Charity not only has him taking part in a sponsored bike ride but he's shot a funny video talking about his support for the charity and given us some questionable cycling tips - the image of him in a crop top is one to behold.

In addition to shooting the video he's not only put it on his own website but also tweeted about it to his 40,000+ followers.  Whether the tweet will increase his fundraising I don't know - I'm a little sceptical on using twitter as a fundraising tool. However now thousands more people know of the event and it certainly keeps you watching to the end. It was also not too 'in your face' about the cause or the ask.

My only criticism is that it's not on the event's website (although it was only posted on YouTube on Friday - so maybe they're in the process) nor has the charity re-tweeted (although with only 232 followers they're dwarfed by David's followers). Charities spend a lot of time gaining some fantastic celebrity support and so often forget to shout about it on their own websites or supporter newsletters.

I don't know whether it was David's or the chairty's idea but thought it was a clever, fun way of using new media with a celebrity and, I suspect, not particularly expensive.

We love you.....we love you not....

I saw a friend on TV last night – no it wasn’t Crimewatch! They were appearing in a prime time drama.

This particular actor used to be in a long running major series and went on to appear in another award winning series. Then they had a few years off screen. They supported a regional charity in their area. One year they rang to check the date of an annual event that attended whenever they could.

This is what they were told “Oh? You want to come this year? It’s just that you’re not very high profile at the moment but you can come if you want”.

Strangely this actor no longer supports that charity – oh and they’re back on TV in a hugely popular long running series.

Long term relationships should be a fundamental goal. People go in and out of fashion with TV producers but that doesn’t mean they can’t help raise the profile of your cause. One minute they’re on a live Saturday night show, the next they’re in panto.

Big charities struggle to get high profile support. It really isn’t easy. There’s more charities than there are celebrities. We all work with the best possible people we can get but never forget those who have donated their time for many years. One it’s good manners and two they are still valuable. I’ve had someone on the cover of a magazine who hadn’t had a major TV role for 25 years.

Many fundraisers will talk about donor care. Celebrities are donors – think how much you’d have to pay for them to endorse a product. That’s the value of the time they’ve given you. Relationship management requires time and effort but can deliver great rewards. Before looking for new celebrities, look at the support you already have and work out creative ways to maximise. ……oh and don’t forget people sometimes come back into fashion. Stick with them through the tough times and they’ll stick with you through the good times.

Charidee = free slebs?

Why is it that companies think that if they mention the Charity word they’ll get celebrities for free? In my inbox today I’ve seen two requests from PR companies; one asking for a celebrity to front a campaign, the other asking for someone to judge an event.

Celebrities get paid good money to do work for commercial organisations. The first said that in exchange for support they’d make a donation to a charity they support - yet the campaign isn’t for that charity and I’d be willing to bet they aren’t planning on donating the normal commercial rate for the celebrity.

The second wanted a full day of the celebrity’s time at an event where they were raising funds for charity but this was clearly a promotional day for the PR’s client. In exchange they promised lots of publicity in a particular leisure pursuit’s press. So they want a day of someone’s time, don’t want to pay and think that the celeb is going to be desperate to get publicity in a niche market, which they obviously wouldn’t get if it weren’t for this fantastic PR company.

Please. Get real. It’s requests like these that give charities a bad name amongst agents and publicists. It makes the jobs of those who do this properly a great deal harder.

There is nothing wrong with using celebrity supporters in conjunction with corporate partners but the celebrity is always representing the charity and never endorsing the partner.

One of my favourite examples of getting it right is this TV advert for Andrex and Teenage Cancer Trust. At the end McFly encourage people to buy an Andrex Puppy soft toy. But McFly aren’t endorsing Andrex. They’re opening words are “We’re supporting Teenage Cancer Trust”. They go on to say if you buy the toy you’ll be raising funds for TCT. What they don’t say is “buy Andrex”. If they’d said that their management would have quite rightly been expecting a fee.

Come on PR’s don’t use the charity sector as a cheap way for you to get celebrity support for your clients.

Celebs, Runs & Treks

The Sun this week was busily telling us that Denise Van Outen is in training to take part in a ‘seven-day hike along Peru's Inca Trail’. It’s a fundraising trek, on which she’ll be joined by Fearne Cotton in support of Breast Cancer Care.

A great piece of coverage for the charity.

However this reminded me of a wider issue I’ve seen in charities.

Not many people get married on their first date (although I’m sure someone will find me an example). So why do many fundraisers think that they can get someone to run a marathon or take part in a trek when they have no knowledge or experience of each other?

I imagine the conversation might go something like this:

Charity: Hello, you’re a famous celebrity

Celebrity: I am, but who are you?

Charity: Well you’ve never heard of us. You don’t know anything about our work and as far as I know you’ve got no known affinity with our cause.

Celebrity: So why are you talking to me?

Charity: Well you being famous and all, we thought you were bound to want to spend six months doing some really hard training, run 26 and a bit miles, talk to lots of media about us and….if you could manage to raise lots of money at the same time that would be fabulous.

Celebrity: HANGS UP

OK, OK, so I exaggerate but that is basically what’s being asked. Running a marathon or taking part in a trek is a huge commitment because of the time involved, not just in terms of the event but also in terms of the training. It’s not the same as providing a quote and a photo.

Working with celebrities is all about building and developing relationships. To go back to my dating analogy it’s about wooing and courtship. Many celebrities very generously do take part in running events and treks generating both money and publicity for great causes. Just look at the coverage of the London Marathon and the Great North Run. Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research and Marie Curie, to name but two, regularly have large numbers of celebrity runners.

However these are almost always people with whom they’ve had long relationships. Denise & Fearne will be making their Peruvian trek for a charity with which they have been involved for a number of years. Therefore the key is to start small and build up to such large requests. It’s clear that Breast Cancer Care have stewarded these relationships well.

…..oh and don’t assume they’ll raise lots of money. I know of one celebrity who did absolutely no fundraising for their chosen charity but did raise the profile by being interviewed on TV. At another charity one actor raised just a few hundred pounds, but again generated publicity.