Red Cross Blogs

The Apprentice: charity version

By Mark Cox
October 14, 2010 at 1:35 pm

It’s Apprentice time again.

The Canary Wharf interview room is booked. ‘Surralan’ – or Lord Sugar as we must now ‘umbly address him– is wheeling out his bespoke range of faux-grumpy and incredulous expressions. His assistant Nick looks, if possible, even more miserable than last year.

And, once more, a dozen or so clueless entities are spouting nonsensically self-aggrandising mantras (‘I give 150 per cent!’; ‘My first words were money, not mummy!’) before going on to make complete berks of themselves when asked to perform a moderately straightforward task.

It’s a modern form of gladiatorial combat, with us viewers in the role of baying, bloodthirsty crowd and Lord Sugar the pinch-faced Nero. What’s not to like?

In fact, it’s such a good idea that Red Cross fundraisers have been using it for years. We regularly set Apprentice-style challenges to corporate companies, where they take over a few Red Cross shops for a day to see who can raise the most money. It’s great: the corporate wonks have a useful team-building day while bringing in oodles of cash for us.

We even stage a proper showdown interview with the Red Cross’ own head of retail, a creature far more terrible in his mood swings than Surralan, wielding the axe on the losers.

Today, in fact, a trio of go-getting teams from the Bank of New York will be running three of our charity shops across Manchester. (Just look out for cashiers wearing pinstripe suits who try to charge you interest on that teapot you’re thinking of buying.)

Our fundraisers are always dreaming up new and wacky ways of bringing in the moolah to support our work. If you’ve got any bright fundraising ideas, do let us know. Best entry wins a bandage.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 14th, 2010 at 1:35 pm and is filed under Fundraising and events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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