The power of charity PR stunts

There are just under 169,000 registered charities in the UK. In such a heavily saturated sector, how can you make your organisation stand out in a unique way without spending a fortune?

Three words. A PR stunt.

For the unfamiliar, a PR, or publicity stunt, is a disruptive marketing tactic with one simple goal – to get people talking.  

More specifically, PR stunts:

• Are short or one-off events, not long-term campaigns.

• Are interesting, original, and memorable.

• Rely on viral marketing, where people share footage of the stunt with their friends, resulting in exponential reach.

If you haven’t experimented with PR stunts, it may be worth considering, as, when they’re planned effectively, they can raise a ton of awareness, generate free column inches, and drive donations.

What does a charity PR stunt look like?

PR stunts come in various shapes and forms and aim to achieve different things.

Let’s look at a few examples.

USA for Africa
Goal: Raise awareness and boost donations

One of the first notable charity PR stunts took place in 1986. Organised by USA for Africa, the stunt, dubbed ‘Hands Across America’ aimed to raise awareness of poverty and hunger by uniting millions of Americans in a single cause: forming a human chain spanning the continental United States.

The ambitious stunt attracted 6.5 million participants, including celebrities such as Whoopi Goldberg, Jerry Seinfeld.

Former President Ronald Reagan and the White House staff even took part.

Participants donated $10 to stand in the chain, and the stunt raised a whopping $34m for the charity.

Greenpeace
Goal: Raise awareness and solicit signatures

PR stunts can also be an effective way to campaign for change.

In 2013, six female activists from global campaigning network, Greenpeace scaled London’s 1,017-foot Shard tower (without permission) to highlight Shell’s plans to drill for oil in the Arctic.

They chose the Shard as Shell’s headquarters are located near the iconic building.

The six women began their ascent in the early hours of July 11, and reached the top at around 7.10pm, at which point they attached a protest flag with the words "Save The Artic" to the building.

The stunt was broadcast live via the internet from cameras mounted on the climbers’ helmets. Greenpeace urged followers to monitor the climber’s progress via a live video link on their website, which featured pop-up boxes asking people to sign a petition and donate.

The women were arrested "on suspicion of aggravated trespass", but the stunt had the desired effect: 65,000 people signed up to support the campaign in the 24 hours following the stunt, and the live stream peaked at 13,000 viewers.

The story also trended globally on Twitter and dominated media coverage on the day.

RNIB
Goal: Raise awareness

In 2021, The Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) opened a mock corner shop to highlight the inaccessibility of packaging by stocking the shelves with vaguely labelled products.

The "WhatsIn store" pop-up provided an insight into how it feels to be confronted with inaccessible packaging, something regularly experienced by people with sight loss.

Hidden cameras in the shop filmed shoppers' reactions to the blank or intentionally vague packaging before the shopkeeper revealed that this is the reality for people with sight loss when they’re out shopping or want to buy food on the go.

The footage was uploaded to RNIB’s social media channels, attracting thousands of views and shares. It also generated widespread media coverage.

The stunt also prompted global drinks brand Coca-Cola to release a line of accessible packaging for blind and partially sighted people.

Sanku and Choose Love
Goal: Raise awareness and funds

In 2022, surprise performance company, ClubMob took to the streets of London for a charity flashmob. (If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, a flashmob is ‘a large public gathering at which a group of people perform a seemingly random song, or dance routine, and then disperse’. Flashmobs are designed to attract attention by disrupting the normal and taking people by surprise).

The professional dancers performed a pre-choreographed routine in four high-profile locations in London, to raise money for two charities; Sanku and Choose Love.

In advance of the event, ClubMob filmed a tutorial of part of the routine, posted it online, and invited people from across the world to learn it and join them on the day. 100 people travelled to London to take part.

The stunt caused quite a stir, with large crowds of bemused passersby stopping to watch and film the performances.

The video has been viewed 320k times and the stunt raised just under £4,000, which was split between the two charities.

WaterAid
Goal: Raise Awareness and solicit signatures

In 2021, WaterAid placed four ice sculptures on the banks of the Thames, to highlight how climate change is causing fragile water sources to disappear for vulnerable communities.

The ice figures depicted people from some of the world’s poorest communities collecting water, to highlight the reality of those living on the frontline of climate change.

The stunt, which formed part of WaterAid’s ‘Our Climate Fight’ campaign, highlighted how climate change is causing fragile water sources to disappear in vulnerable communities.

The charity used it to encourage the public to sign their open letter to the UK Government, urging them to ‘invest a third of the UK’s committed international climate funding in locally-led adaptation projects, to help vulnerable communities get a reliable source of water, so they can protect themselves against the impacts of climate change’.

Looking for an experienced event fundraiser to make your next event go off with a bang? We can help. Give us a call on 0203 750 1111 or email us on info@bamboofundraising.co.uk

Trustee Roles 101

In one of our previous blog posts, we gave you the lowdown on trustees. We looked at what a trustee is, the benefits of taking on a trustee role, and the responsibilities that come with it.

In this post, we’re going to look at:

• the composition of a charity board

• the skills and experience charities look for when recruiting board members

• the various roles you can apply for

Before we dive in, here’s a quick recap on the role of a trustee board.

A trustee is a volunteer who serves on the governing body of a charity, (known as the board of trustees.) The board has overall control of a charity and is responsible for making sure the charity does what it was set up to do.

Taking on a trustee role is a great way to help your community/a cause you care about while meeting new people and developing new skills. An invigorating and dynamic role, it puts you at the very heart of a charity and its work.

Composition of a charity board

Charity boards often comprise of 5-12 trustees. And they thrive on diversity, so charities look to recruit trustees of all ages, and from a range of backgrounds, with a variety of skills, experience, and perspectives.

Every charity is different, but most boards consist of trustees with a mix of:

• Specific professional or business skills such as finance, marketing, IT, or human resources.

• Personal, lived experience of the issues the charity focuses on.

• ‘Soft’ skills such as facilitating, teamwork, problem-solving, or even building the social side of being on a board.

• Experience working at a strategic level.

Honorary Officers

You can either apply to be a general trustee or what is known as a ‘charity’ or ‘honorary officer’. While each trustee has equal legal and financial responsibility, charity officers carry out specific duties to help the board function effectively.

Charity officer roles include a Chair, Vice Chair, Treasurer, and Secretary, and they’re usually appointed/elected by the board.

What do honorary officers do?

Every charity is different, but we’ve outlined the key responsibilities for each role to give you an idea of what’s required.

Chair

The primary role of a chair is to provide leadership to the board.

Responsibilities

• taking responsibility for the board’s composition and development

• planning and conducting board meetings

• ensuring the board is effective in setting and implementing the charity’s direction and strategy.

• supporting and supervising the chief executive and acting as a channel of communication between the board and staff

• acting as a figurehead for the charity (for example, representing it at functions, meetings, or in the press).

• leading on the development of the board and making sure that its decisions are carried out.

• taking urgent action (but not decision-making unless authorised) between board meetings when it isn’t possible or practical to hold a meeting.

Vice-chair

Some boards recruit a vice chair. In some cases, the vice-chair acts as a deputy for the chair, taking on the chair’s role when the chair is absent. In others, the vice-chair is the ‘chair in waiting’ or ‘chair designate’ and will take over the chair’s role at the end of their tenure.

Treasurer

The treasurer helps trustees carry out their financial responsibilities.

Responsibilities

• presenting financial reports to the board in a format that helps the board understand the charity’s financial position.

• advising the board on how to carry out its financial responsibilities.

• ensuring compliance with financial systems and policies.

• working with professional advisors.

• overseeing the preparation of annual accounts.

• taking on some of the day-to-day financial duties, such as book-keeping, budgeting, and preparation of reports (particularly in small charities)

In case you’re wondering, the Treasurer is not solely responsible for the charity’s finances. All the trustees are jointly responsible and should be able to understand, consider and comment on financial information.

Secretary

The role of the Secretary is to support the Chair in ensuring the smooth functioning of the board.

Responsibilities

• Liaising with the Chair to plan committee meetings.

• Ensuring meetings are effectively organised and minuted.

• Checking that agreed actions from board meetings are carried out.

• Keeping up-to-date contact details of board members.

• Keeping a record of the organisation’s activities.

• Acting as a custodian of the organisation’s governing documents.

• Ensuring elections are in line with stipulated procedures.

• Ensuring organisation’s activities are in line with its objectives.

• Ensuring charity and company law requirements are met.

• Sitting on appraisal, recruitment, and disciplinary panels, as required.

• Ensuring meetings are in person or online in line with the governing document.

• Responding to all committee correspondence.

• Preparing a report of the organisation’s activities for the Annual General Meeting.

 Interested in becoming a trustee and want some help finding the right cause and role? We can help. Give us a call on 020 3750 3111 or email info@bamboofundraising.co.uk to chat to our friendly team.

Blogging 101: Part one

Thinking about starting a blog? There’s never been a better time to do it.

The latest research shows that blogs are read by a whopping 77% of internet users. That equates to just under 4 billion people who actively seek out blog content on a regular basis.

This puts organisations that blog at a competitive advantage.

How? For starters, they receive 55% more website visitors and 97% more links to their website. That’s an impressive amount of traffic for a tactic that costs 62% less than traditional marketing formats but generates 3x the leads.

If you consider that 70% of people would rather learn about an organisation through blog posts than ads, you’ll see why a blog is a no-brainer.

In short, if you’re not blogging, you’re missing out.

What is a blog?

For the unfamiliar, let’s kick off with a definition.

A blog (short for weblog) is a regularly updated website or web page that provides business content.

It’s a powerful marketing channel (just like social media, direct mail, email marketing, etc.,) that can be used (among other things) to publish insights, thoughts, stories, and educational content.

Why blog?

The primary purpose of blogging is to boost traffic to your website. But it also provides you with an opportunity to provide an expert voice and engage supporters.

Let’s look at these in a little more detail.

1.   Boost website traffic

When you want to research something, be it a product, service, or company, where do you look? The internet.

Search engines (i.e., Google, Bing, Microsoft Edge) are our first port of call to find information. This includes donors looking for charities to support.

If you want your website to be the first one donors see, you need to be at the top of the search pages (just as RSPCA is when you type in ‘animal charities UK’).

SEO, or ‘search engine optimization’ is the process of improving your website to push it further up the search pages on the search engines.

Here are three ways blogging helps with SEO.

New Content

Search engines love fresh, high-quality content. By regularly publishing blog posts on your website, you’re signalling to search engines that your site is active, relevant, and authoritative.

The more blog content you create, the more opportunities you’ll have to show up in search engines and drive traffic to your website.

Keyword Optimisation

Blogging provides a valuable opportunity to incorporate keywords and phrases into your content. This improves your website's visibility in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Backlinks

One of the most important factors in SEO is the quality and quantity of backlinks pointing to your site. A backlink is when one website links to another with an anchor text. An example of a backlink is any article you find that links to another source or website.

Blogging can help you attract backlinks by creating valuable, shareable content that other websites will want to link to.

2.   Provide an expert voice

Want people to see you as the go-to charity in your niche? A blog can help you achieve it. If you publish high-quality, original content that educates and informs your audience on a regular basis, they’ll keep coming back for more.

You can educate your audience by:

• Offering practical tips and advice
  Example: Supporting a partner with depression

• Sharing useful insights from events/research
  Example: 6 take-home messages from the world’s largest haematology conference

• Including interviews/opinions/thought pieces from experts in your niche
  Example: International Day of Women and Girls in Science 2022: Meet professor Melissa Westwood

• Promoting other organisations that offer support in your niche
  Example: Guest blog: Disability Law Service

• How-to posts
  Example: Testicular cancer: symptoms, tests, and treatment, and how to check your balls

3.   Engage supporters

In a recent blog post, we explained that humans are hardwired to respond to stories. They activate emotional centres in our brains, evoking strong, visceral reactions such as empathy and anger. When emotions are triggered, it inspires us to act (i.e., make a donation). This makes story telling an incredibly powerful tool for fundraisers.

Okay, but what sort of stories trigger emotion? Stories about:

• The issues you’re tackling
  Example: Violence against women: the statistics around the world

• The people you help
  Example: Sarah’s story

• Your supporters
  Example: Starlight Champion and Cyclist: Richard Betteridge

• The impact you have
  Example: Ukraine one year on: the Red Cross Red Crescent's response

Final Word

In this post, we’ve told you why you should be blogging. In the next couple of posts, we’ll tell you how to blog, share some best practice tips in terms of format, design, content, and promotion, and look at some real-life examples for inspiration.

In the meantime, if you’re looking to launch a blog but don’t have the time or resources to get it off the ground, we can help. Give us a call on 020 3750 3111 to find out how.

Free and discounted resources for charities

Been scouring the internet for a budget-friendly CRM system or impacting reporting tool? In need of urgent legal advice or IT support but can’t make the numbers work?

Did you know that, as a charity, you can get all these things (and more) for free/at a reduced rate?

In the current climate, every penny counts, so we’ve put together a handy list of free/low-cost resources you can draw on to make your budget stretch further.

Office furniture

Need some office furniture to accommodate your expanding fundraising team?

Contact Collecteco. They partner with companies to donate unwanted/surplus office furniture, equipment, and materials to good causes across the UK, enabling you to furnish your office for free.

All you need to do is send them a wish list of the items you need via this form and they’ll let you know when a match becomes available. When it does, they can also arrange low-cost delivery.

IT support & software

Want to upgrade your website but lacking in internal IT resources? Check out the Charity IT Association (CITA).

CITA is an easy-to-use platform that matches charities to IT professionals looking to donate their time and expertise to the third sector.

Typical projects include migrating to a new software system, e-mail setup and management, and IT software or hardware selection and deployment.

The service is free for charities with an income of £50k or less. There’s a small charge for larger charities.

You can find out more and register your charity here.

Legal advice

Legal advice costs a fortune … unless you know where to look.

Enter LawWorks: a charity that connects volunteer solicitors with people in need of legal advice, who are not eligible for legal aid and cannot afford to pay, and with the charities that support them.

Their Not-for-Profits Programme provides free legal advice to small charities on a wide range of legal issues, to support the continuation and expansion of their services.

They can help with one-off legal issues (like drafting a contract, reviewing a lease, updating a constitution, or clarifying rights in a commercial dispute); or on a longer-term basis, for example, to carry out a review of your organisation's documents, identify potential legal issues, and/or be a first port of call for legal queries).

They also have a range of legal resources on their website that answer some of the frequently asked questions they receive from charities.

Find out more on their website.

Management consultancy

Need a hand with your charity strategy, business plan, financial management, governance, or impact reporting? The Cranfield Trust can help.

The charity provides pro bono consultancy and management support to charities, through their network of skilled volunteer consultants and advisers.

They help to build resilient and sustainable charities using their Journey to Excellence framework, offering free support in four key management areas: Leadership and Strategic Direction, People Management, Financial Management and Sustainability, and Performance and Impact.

They also have a library of free webinars that cover topics such as charity business planning and strategy, bid writing, and financial forecasting.

Check you’re eligible for support and drop them an email here.

Looking to expand your fundraising team? We can help. Give us a call on 020 3750 3111 or email info@bamboofundraising.co.uk to get started.

How is the third sector tackling the volunteer shortage?

New research has revealed that volunteering has fallen to a historic low in England post-Covid.

The National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) surveyed 7,000 adults for its Time Well Spent report and found that those raising money or taking part in sponsored events was down from 11% to 6% since 2018. Meanwhile, the Charities Aid Foundation's UK Giving report found there were 1.6 million fewer people volunteering compared to five years ago.

The decline is also evident from the government’s latest annual Community Life survey.

The survey found that in 2021/22, around seven million people volunteered for a charity or local group at least once a month, down from 11 million in 2019/20.

The figures mark the lowest ever participation recorded by the survey, which has been running for a decade.

What’s caused the decrease?

The pandemic is a major factor. People who were lifelong volunteers broke their habit during the pandemic and haven’t gone back to it.

Since the end of lockdown, enthusiasm among volunteers – particularly professionals – has plummeted, while the cost-of-living crisis has made it harder for people on lower incomes to help.

Some of the drop off can also be attributed to spending cuts on voluntary infrastructure.

Impact

Charities are suffering as a result. For example, the Scouts has 90,000 young people on their waiting list, but they’re struggling to recruit volunteers to run the groups.

Meanwhile, the Charity Retail Association, (which represents charity shops), said its volunteer numbers have dropped from 230,000 to 186,000 since the pandemic.

Some charities are being forced to pause operations due to the double whammy of the recruitment crisis and volunteer shortage.

How is the volunteer shortage being addressed?

Over the past year-18 months, various initiatives have been developed by voluntary sector organisations and the government to address the problem:

Vision for Volunteering

Last December, the government committed to investing £600,000 into Vision for Volunteering - a ten-year strategic plan to create a better future for volunteering.

Led by a coalition of voluntary organisations including NAVCA, NCVO, Volunteering Matters, and the Association of Volunteer Managers, the Vision for Volunteering launched in May 2022.

More than 350 people from over 300 organisations - both big and small - contributed to its first phase in a year-long engagement exercise.

Five key areas were identified from the exercise, in which volunteering needs to evolve over the next decade:

• Awareness and appreciation

• Power

• Equity and inclusion

• Collaboration

• Experimentation

You can read more about the five themes here.

The next phase of the project will focus on turning the vision into reality.

Over the next 18 months, a newly established Vision for Volunteering team will engage with partners and stakeholders to raise awareness of the Vision, build a community to champion the Vision, share stories of positive change, collect evidence, and share learnings.

The ultimate aim of the Vision is to see volunteering ingrained in our national psyche, and to be accessible and welcoming to everyone everywhere, so the benefits of volunteering are equally distributed.

The Big Help Out

To inspire people to start volunteering, the Scouts, the Royal Voluntary Service and the Together Coalition, teamed up to organise the Big Help Out on Monday 8 May.

Promoted as a National Day of Volunteering, the aim of the initiative was to bring communities together and create a lasting volunteering legacy from the Coronation weekend.

Over 30,000 charities seized the opportunity to issue a call for support, and an estimated 6.5 million people answered.

Following the event, 7.81 million people said they’re more likely to volunteer after taking part.

While the public response is encouraging, as Matt Hyde, chief executive of the Scouts, pointed out: “we don’t want this to stop just because the coronation is over. It cannot be a one-off. We need to build on today’s momentum to keep inspiring the next generation of volunteers.”

The organisers are planning to make the Big Help Out an annual event, and they’ll be drawing on its success to promote volunteering during Volunteers’ Week, which is taking place from 1-7 June.

Final Word

The voluntary sector contributes around £20bn to the UK's economy each year. Given how important volunteering is to our social fabric, re-engaging lapsed volunteers and attracting new ones needs to be high on the third sector (and the Government’s) agenda.

Charities can play their part by reviewing and re-working their volunteer strategies to make their proposition more appealing and addressing the areas of focus outlined in the Vision for Volunteering strategy.

Looking for a talented fundraiser to focus on volunteer engagement? We can help. Call us on 020 3750 3111 or email info@bamboofundraising.co.uk for an informal chat.