Zakis' top tips
Are you launching a charity appeal? Here are some of the critical areas for consideration:
Relationships
First and foremost, it’s the age old rule — be nice to people. Treat them how you would like to be treated, as you never know when you might need them. Throughout this campaign I had to rely on the kindness of people from lending vans so we could pick up boxes, to volunteers who’ve helped pack boxes, to the teachers who let us hijack their lessons so we could get children involved, to free radio airtime.
PR campaign
People often assume that PR is just about sending a press release out. The whole of The Box Appeal campaign relied on PR as we had no budget for advertising/marketing. The PR campaign for The Box Appeal actually extended beyond the media; I would say 50% of it was pure community relations. Never underestimate the power of word of mouth.
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We invested a lot of time and effort approaching schools, expatriate groups, women’s guilds and embassies to get them involved in The Box Appeal.
Free tools — social media
Like our PR activities, social media was crucial to the success of this campaign; not only is it a free tool but it gave a further sense of community to the appeal by allowing people to share their thoughts about the Box Appeal and gave our supporters a sense of involvement. We asked them to post photos of themselves filling boxes, which meant that the Facebook page always had plenty of fresh content which helped to keep it interesting.
Be Creative
The campaign ran for a month, so it was a challenge to keep the momentum going. We did this by using the media and did weekly up-dates with key press. We also did a lot of community activities, we went into schools and held drawing competitions, we held competitions within hotels and offices to see which teams could collect the most boxes.
We also did The Box Appeal tour with the breakfast team from Radio 1, they toured several locations in Abu Dhabi picking up boxes from schools and offices.
Utilizing your team
There’s not one single Rezidor team member that didn’t talk to people every single day about The Box Appeal. From the reception staff who talked about it whilst people were checking in to the sales team, who when out and about visiting clients took boxes with them, to the purchasing teams who made use of their contacts within the industry to fill boxes.
Passion and commitment
Everyone has to be committed and go beyond what their job roles entail to make a campaign like The Box Appeal work. The Box Appeal teams worked on their weekends to sort through all the boxes that were delivered, they drove all over the different cities dropping off and picking up boxes, they spent their afternoons in supermarkets telling shoppers about the appeal.
We had a dedicated team in each hotel and they all had a sense of ownership with regards to the project. I have experienced passion for this project in the most unlikely of people — you would be very surprised how passionate people can become about a project like this and the lengths that they will go to, to help the appeal succeed.
Time
When it comes to a charity campaign you can’t hire people to run around for you — you have to be prepared to do the dirty jobs yourself and get involved in every element of the project. The Box Appeal teams have been unloading boxes in the boiling hot sun, making up 100s of boxes, and individually calling people to remind them to bring their box back to the hotel.
This is all very time consuming, so it’s important that if you undertake a campaign and you want it to be successful, that you have the man power, but also that you allow members of your team to have a little extra time to take part in activities like this. This year’s campaign has taught me that the logistics part of the campaign is the most time consuming element of an activity like this.
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