Some maths I might need.

Executive Summary

To raise money for the Help for Heroes Quick Reaction Fund, our group elected to host pub quizzes in each of our office locations and a bake and sandwich sale at the Epsom office, where we would also sell Help for Heroes merchandise.

The bake sale was a great success, raising over £600 with high demand for the cakes and sandwiches but this total was aided by generous donations to the charity for the office’s ‘dress down Friday’.

The pub quizzes, while not contributing in the region of the day in Epsom, raised a pleasing £300 . At all locations, awareness of the charity was promoted by the inclusion of a Help for Heroes round in the quiz and at several locations we distributed Help for Heroes wristbands.

Overall, we felt, as a team, that we had achieved our initial goals and were extremely pleased to have surpassed our expected fundraising target of £700 by £939.11.

Preliminary Discussions

On the second day of the internship, we met with LIzzie James, Help for Heroes’ Head of Corporate Relationships to discuss how best to help the charity. We had a wealth of ideas, with the most prominent and practical being a bake sale, hosting a charity ball or volunteering at a Help for Heroes site. We soon learnt that the latter two ideas were not ideal; balls had been a frequent source of difficulties and there were no volunteering opportunities of any nature available for us during the time of the internship and, even if there had been, this idea was further complicated by the need for security clearance when working for the Ministry of Defence.

After initial discussions, the team settled on two events to promote Help for Heroes: a pub quiz, which would take place in the five locations of the team members, namely Birmingham, Epsom, Harrow, London and Leeds; and a bake sale and picnic intended to be held in a park adjoining the Epsom office, which would also include sports activities and the vending of Help for Heroes merchandise to raise awareness of the charity. Help for Heroes allow their fundraisers to request £250 worth of selected items that can then be sold at the event on a sale or return basis, an offer that we decided to take advantage of. We decided to sell: keyrings; trolley coins; shirts; pencils; photo frames; wristbands; and bears. Taking all this into consideration, we set a fundraising target of £700.

It was decided that the money raised by our activities would be donated specifically to the Quick Reaction Fund, known as the QRF. Help for Heroes established the QRF with the purpose of ensuring that soldiers and their loved ones are appropriately supported, within seventy two hours of need being identified. This ranges from adapting a house so as to accommodate a physical injury to covering transport costs so that a hospitalised soldier can have a loved one present, at the earliest time possible.

Our original goal was to have the pub quizzes simultaneously in order to allow us to immediately determine the highest scoring team of all locations and present them with their prize before leaving. With this in mind we aimed to each procure a venue, with an aim of the quiz being held on one of the 26th, 27th or 28th of July and then establish a common date that worked for each location. This proved to be quite difficult and it was eventually decided that we would reduce our aim to having the quizzes within the same week and we would announce the victorious team as soon as the final quiz was held. Our quiz would comprise five rounds, each comprising ten questions. One round would be a Help for Heroes round, in which we would give each team a Help for Heroes leaflet, give them time to read it through and then collect the leaflets back in and test the teams’ recall of facts they had just read; a simple idea to aid promotion of the charity.

For the bake sale, we would each bake three cakes varieties or cakes and would buy a set of Help for Heroes cake tins, which we would use to carry the cakes to the Epsom office and would then try to sell.

Planning

Our first conference call was held on Friday 8th July. During the call, it was decided that advertising for the bake sale should begin once our discussions had concluded; to this end an email was sent informing employees of the the event and its details. After a brief interval, the two members of the group working in the Epsom office were approached by two members of Group 8, working for the hospice in St Albans. It was at this point that they informed our two team members that they had planned the same events; a pub quiz for the same week as ours and, potentially, a bake sale planned for the week beginning the 1st of August, both of which would take place in the Epsom office.

As a group, we were of the opinion that a rival bake sale would not impact the takings from our own, due to a two week time difference, with ours being the first, combined with the fact that a bake sale during lunch does not occupy much of an individual’s time or money. However we felt that competing pub quizzes would present a greater problem due to the need to hold them after work, the amount of time they would take in order to properly host them with a likely result of a reduced employee presence and reduced takings at each quiz. Further complications were introduced by the fact that Group 8 had already secured a venue, date and prize for their quiz, as well as having written their own quiz. After internal discussions, it appeared that the only way forward was for us to attempt negotiations with Group 8 in the hope of sharing a joint quiz. This proposition was well received by Group 8; they were willing to share their venue, date and prize and were prepared to allow us to keep the Help for Heroes round of our quiz without introducing a round on their own charity, which had not featured in their original quiz. The one concession they demanded was that they be responsible for one round of the joint quiz, an entirely reasonable request in our opinions. At this point, we treated the issue as resolved.

Several days later, a similar problem again presented itself. Two groups, who had not intended to hold a pub quiz when all the groups had discussed their plans with each other on the first Tuesday of the internship to ensure there were no conflicts, had now modified their plans and were going to host a joint pub quiz in the London office, which was still in a state of transition after the merger. On learning of the clash, we approached the team who had sent out the email announcing their quiz and informed them of the problem and suggested we might resolve it by combining the quizzes into one; we felt they had more to gain from this than we did as their quiz was planned for after ours, whose date was set for Tuesday 26th July. Our offer was declined, with them citing the facts that they had already joined with another group and that they had secured a venue, date and questions and saw no potential benefit from joining us. We responded by reaffirming our intention to host our quiz on 26th July as planned. After this, we were told that they had had to change the date of their quiz to Monday 25th July, despite previous claims of the date being sorted, as that was the only date their venue could make. An invitation email to the new pub quiz was sent out, leaving us unable to realistically host our pub quiz.

Further to this, the groups had not invited all departments of the London office, causing concern that this may incite a divide between Aon and Hewitt employees before the move from Moore London to Devonshire Square was even complete. Our reaction to these events was one of frustration, as the pub quiz had been an idea of ours since the second day of the internship and it appeared that theses groups had only decided to host one after we had conveyed our intentions to others. Nonetheless we decided that the best course of action was for us not to host a quiz in the London office, in the hope of the invitation being extended to the entire office to encourage amicable relations amongst the Aon and Hewitt employees, and that our team members at the London office would help at the quiz in Harrow instead.

With regard to fundraising in the park, it was discovered, after contact with the Help for Heroes Events’ Co-ordinator and the council, that any endeavours raising money in a public area would require prior permission from the council; this would take four weeks to grant, meaning that we may not have received permission in time even if we had applied on the first day of the internship. With this in mind, we modified our plans so that the bake sale and merchandise would take place inside the Hewitt office. This was unfortunate as it would mean a loss of custom from the public and would greatly reduce the chances of having an actual picnic or the planned rounders match but it was a necessary decision. The weather forecast continued to be promising however and we held out some hope that we might be able to host the sports activities in the park, once money had been collected in the office.

Publicity

To promote the bake sale and attract the interest of the public, we researched local media with the intention of them either advertising the day in advance or writing an article about it once it had been held.

Three newspapers were contacted, of which one did not reply and another of which did not feel Epsom did not fall within their remit. However, the final newspaper, The Epsom Guardian, was keen to publish our event and assigned a reporter to interview a team member.

As for promotion prior to the event, we approached two local radio stations, who placed the relevant information on their websites, as well as announcing details in bulletins on the radio itself, assisting us in reaching a wider audience.

It was only after this that we learnt of the necessity for a permit to host fundraising activities in a public place, at which point our plans for publicity had to change. We notified The Epsom Guardian of the problem and, in the end, they decided against publishing any article relating to our event.

With regard to in-office publicity, the Help for Heroes publicity team provided us with the relevant insignia and guidelines for the use of its promotional materials, as the charity places great value on its branding to maintain its professionalism, and hence has strict regulations on how, for example, its logo may be used and modified. Once we had designed posters and confirmed that with Help for Heroes that they met their guidelines, we circulated them amongst the team members, to be displayed in the appropriate locations.

The Bake Sale

The team fully assembled at the Epsom office on the day of the cake sale at about ten thirty in the morning, prepared with cakes, provisions with which to make sandwiches for people to buy as their lunch and the merchandise we had ordered from Help for Heroes on sale or return. On arrival, we set up in a communal kitchen, notified the building by email of our intention to sell both the merchandise and food and at once began to prepare the sandwiches, which we would begin selling slightly later in the day. The immediate reaction was extremely pleasing; for the first hour and a half or so, there was a constant flow of people coming to buy cakes, many showing a real interest in the charity and keen to learn more of its aims.

At about eleven thirty, there was a good variety and number of sandwiches to sell and we began moving through the floor we were stationed on with several platters of sandwiches, hoping to entice people to buy ours before they had the chance to go to the local shops or buy from the sandwich van that delivered to the building, as well as a tray of cakes. Again, people responded extremely positively and there was high demand for the food we were selling, with several restocks needed and with sandwiches running out by approximately one o’clock. Around this time, enthusiasm for our remaining cakes became quite low and for around the next hour to hour and a half, we sold fairly few cakes. Interest for the sports activities in the park was not significant, not least of all due to the short lunches most of the employees were in the habit of taking, and so we did not attempt to encourage people outside.

At half past two, we took the remaining sandwiches and merchandise around the building with a collection bucket, as one Friday in each month the office collected money for a charity so with employees paying to dress casually for the day and the office had kindly offered to donate to Help for Heroes this day. By this juncture, most of the office had eaten all the food that they wanted and we did not sell many more cakes, however people continued to donate generously. To this point in the day, little merchandise had sold, including the Help for Heroes wristbands so we began to offer them to people who made the suggested donation of £2, as mandated by the charity, to help us to leave a legacy for Aon Hewitt with Help for Heroes.

At four o’clock, two of our team members, from the Birmingham and Leeds offices, departed so that they could catch their return trains, leaving the remaining six of us to make a final attempt at selling either food or merchandise. This turned out to be a last minute success, with two sets of cake tins and a football being sold in the final half hour.

In total, we raised £50.48 from merchandise and £486.24 from sandwiches and cakes. After the deduction of £44.52 for the expenses associated with baking the cakes, we raised a net total of £492.20.

Our Thoughts

This has been a challenging but throughly enjoyable task for all members of the group and we feel that we should be proud of our achievements. Despite being presented with a variety of obstacles, some at highly inconvenient times, we successfully exceeded our fundraising target by over £200, raised awareness of Help for Heroes and the Quick Reaction Fund.

Our journey over the last six weeks has been an a memorable one and one in which we have learnt much about the qualities necessary to achieve the goals we set our ourselves: communication; organisation; listening; compromise; and, above all else, effective team work.

Many people have helped us on our way but we would like to offer particular thanks to our facilitator Julie Hyett for all her help and advice, to Lizzie James for leading us to the idea of a bake sale and pub quiz and advising us when we needed clarification on any issues, to Aon Hewitt for allowing us to host the bake sale within the Epsom office and, most importantly, to all those who donated to the cause. We couldn’t have done it without you.

To Do

More on planning, getting touch with council, getting in touch with reporters, booking venues etc.

Expand on the bake sale.

Greater explanation of Epsom delay?

Prevent us from sounding responsible for sports day not happening?

Expand on bake sale?