BHF offers online love poem e-card
Howard Lake | 11 February 2004 | News
The British Heart Foundation is encouraging lovers to send one of their “interactive e-cards” this Valentine’s Day and raise funds for the charity. The e-cards, on receipt, are ‘read out’ by a sound-alike celebrity of their admirer’s choice.
The British Heart Foundation (BHF) is this year offering an amusing online element to its Real Valentine Campaign to “mend real broken hearts.” The charity believes it’s taking the standard charity e-card a stage further.
BHF is encouraging romantics to visit its Real Valentine Campaign microsite and craft their own poetic ditty to their loved one. They can choose from a wide range of words to follow the traditional lines, “Roses are Red, Violets are Blue”, with their own touching, soppy or funny verse.
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When the card is completed, users have the option to donate money to the BHF and they can also order a Real Valentine Campaign fundraising pack.
The personalised card is then sent by e-mail and the recipient hears the message read out by a sound-alike celebrity of their admirer’s choice, such as Robbie Williams, Barbara Windsor or Eminem. They too then have the option to send their own love poem and donate to the charity.
The original idea came from from the BHF’s own Web team. The BHF’s online manager Bertrand Bosredon said: “The British Heart Foundation is producing an alternative card-making kit for Valentine’s Day and we wanted to complement that with an online version.
“Normal e-cards are a bit old hat now and people are looking for something a bit more original at this time of year, so we decided to make it interactive, multi-media and fun. I’ve already sent one to my mum and she loved it!”
The poem generator was designed for the BHF using Flash software and impersonators were used for the celebrity sound-alikes.
The online card is amusing and offers a wide choice of words which can be inserted into your personalised message. However, it does require you to come up with your own message, so might put some people off. Some ready-made examples might have helped boost the number of people using the service. Also, the “donate” button that appeared on the page which asked you to send the e-card felt misplaced. One is not likely to have gone through the effort of making the card and then head off to make a donation. The point at which to make a donation is straight after the card has been sent. BHF do of course include a prominent message at this stage, although interestingly they use a “click here” graphical button, rather than “donate”.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.