Coupons For A Fundraising Event: Any Publicity Is Good Publicity?
Howard Lake | 28 March 2012 | Blogs
I never thought I would come across the MS Society and its fundraising annual event Cake Break on ThisIsMoney.co.uk today.
According to the article’s title “Online ‘ultra’ money savers wreck charity bake plans by exploiting ‘free bread for a year’ offer” you would have thought that this was disaster for all parties involved…but was it?
To describe the situation in brief, one of the UK’s biggest and best known charities was today forced to cancel some coupons for its annual fundraising event, Cake Break. The reason for this was that a money-saving voucher used to promote the charity’s fundraising annual event Cake Break was promoted on money-saving websites and was spotted by thousands of money-saving Brits, effectively hijacking the deal – what is also known as “the Groupon effect”.
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The commercial party involved in this partnership (Wright’s Baker) forgot to include the crucial wording in the coupons outlining that the vouchers were only for fundraising, and also failed to brand these with MS Society’s name and logo.
Whether this was intentional or not, I will not be tempted into expressing my opinion and commenting on so I will leave this to the public’s own judgement.
The charity and the corporate partner, as you can read on the original article, both made statements and already cancelled the coupons. But all parties involved, the MS Society, Wright’s Baker, the websites involved and the fundraising event in May, got good publicity and created some PR noise that made the news.
Or is this a sign of the current tough economic times where everyone of us will go a long way to grab a bargain?
If you want to read the full article click here.
Vasileios Kospanos is a B2B and social media marketing professional, who has been working with charities for the past five years from the Gestalt Centre in London, and recently with AdvantageNFP in Redbourn. You can find him on Twitter at @vasilakosp and @AdvantageNFP. Views here his own.
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.