Charity Advertising Calls

stuffit1

Does anyone know anything about a company called CHESTNUT HOUSE? They call businesses to advertise on year planners they say are to help the Honeyrose Foundation charity for dying kids. They phoned me last week and asked if I'd sponsor the year planner with an advert for my company. It sounded like a really worthwhile cause and the business they promised I'd get from the advert sounded fantastic too, they said 100,000 year planners are sent out to Essex businesses and organisations. I don't know what to do though because I've done a search in google and loads of bad stuff comes up about them. Has anyone advertised with them? If so I'd appriciate your opinions on the subject. The lads calling me back next week and I don't know if if should help them of not.

oldtoolie

Well, you have two choices:

you could give your money to a known conman, assuming that what his people tell you is true and everything else you hear about them is wrong.

Or you could spend your money on some well planned marketing and make a donation to a properly run charity.

If you look at the HoneyRose website you will see that they aim to benefit people over 40, so there's one lie the Chesnut House people have already told you.

Savvy_Sue

Have a read of this thread from the small biz board, sounds very similar kind of thing ...

stuffit1

Thanks for all the advice guys, I told the lad no when he called back in the week and he was quite rude to me when I questioned his integrity and enquired how much commission he’s on. Interestingly, I looked on the Honeyrose Foundations website and it clearly states that only 5% of Chestnut House's profits goes to them, which is certainly not what their lad told me 2 weeks ago. I’ve asked them to remove me from their database.

a41

Why do these people do these things. There is a limit to how far you can push the limit.

Ianna

Don't have anything to do with them.

GiveItBack

For anyone else; there are a number of people selling similar ads, some are genuine, some are not, some are partly genuine (some of the money does go to some charity). In general, at best they are a poor way to give, and a poor way to promote your business.

They can often be very pushy, and once you are on one list, you tend to find yourself on many.