First charity branded bus claim disputed
Howard Lake | 24 July 2003 | News
Macmillan Cancer Relief might have missed the bus themselves earlier this week in claiming to have launched the first charity branded bus. NSPCC say they beat them to it by three years.
It is always risky claiming to have achieved a fundraising first on UK Fundraising, because one or more of our many thousands of readers usually gets in touch to point out that they had already done that years before.
This has just happened with Macmillan Cancer Relief’s claim this week to have launched the first charity branded bus. UK Fundraising thought their claim was a little unlikely following our coverage of the Amnesty International UK ‘We Know Where You Live’ bus in 2001.
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Now we hear from the former NSPCC Full Stop Campaign Manager for the Midlands who says that the charity ran a branded bus for a year back in 2000. Valentine Morby told UK Fundraising: “The campaign launched in 1999 and, following generous support from West
Midlands Travel Company and one of their advertising suppliers, we had a branded Full Stop bus in Birmingham for one year. It was well publicised in our internal Full Stop Press paper and in the Birmingham Evening Mail.”
This claim was then followed by those of several other charities. NDCS launched its Listening Bus back in 1996, and Action for Blind People have had two buses on the road “for ages”.
Last but not least The National Playbus Association have hundreds of their own buses.
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.