Many charities are jumping on the band wagon to employ a Celebrity Liaison/Relationship Officer to recruit celebrities to attend their balls, have their photographs taken with supporters or hand over cheques to corporate supporters. But have they thought: firstly whether they need a full time person to recruit celebrities, or secondly if they have enough projects and/or campaigns to keep engaged celebrities busy?
Other charities decide to delegate the job to a staff member - usually someone in the media department who is already working to tight deadlines and may not have the necessary skills or time to build and maintain long term relationships. A press officer has all the right communication skills to engage a celebrity to back a PR campaign or to turn up at a press call or photo shoot, but long term relationship engagement and management is usually better handled by someone in fundraising - a major donor or corporate manager.
The other downside of delegating the celebrity engagement job to someone already employed by the charity is that they may only look at celebrity support from the view of their own department. For example, using a celebrity to run the Great North Run may or may not get media coverage but this is a great opportunity for them to raise funds from their friends and family - nothing gets a celebrity more engaged to your work than giving you money.
This leads me back to the question posed in the heading of this article - do charities actually need celebrity endorsement? Recent research from nfpSynergy (Charity Awareness Monitor, March 08) found that around 35% of people think that it is 'fairly worthwhile ' to hold celebrity events with around 14% thinking that it is 'very wasteful'. More than 50% thought that the celebrity supporter should have some kind of attachment to the charity e.g. Ambassador or Patron.
With this in mind - if you do decide to go the 'celebrity endorsement' route you must ensure that you pair the right celebrity to the right campaign/project. Do not use celebrities gratuitously. No one wants to be in a similar situation to Unicef when Geri Halliwell, a goodwill ambassador, was interviewed and it was obvious that her grasp of the issues was embarrassingly weak. More and more publications are interested in case studies of people who have been helped by a charity rather than a celebrity who has given a couple of quotes of support and a picture. Indeed - it can sometimes be better to use a stakeholder e.g. a patient case study or service user.
If you do have celebrities at an event - give them something to do. If you do have a celebrity take part in a challenge event like the marathon ensure that they fundraise - even if they get given a free celebrity running place ensure that they raise the minimum expected of a gold bond runner.
To answer the question posed - think long and hard before you employ a celebrity officer or delegate these duties to an existing staff member and get advice from people already doing the job. Celebrity endorsement can be a real benefit to the work that you do but it can also have long reaching consequences if not done properly.
Sandra Mattocks is a Celebrity Consultant. She has worked with charities such as: ChildLine, WSPA, Teenage Cancer Trust and Anthony Nolan Trust.
Contact: celebrityliaison@live.co.uk