Saturday, February 11, 2012
The Irish Hospice Foundation has received an unexpected fundraising boost from an unlikely source — Victoria Beckham.
Posh Spice herself tweeted a message of thanks last week to Bono and Ali Hewson, who gave David and Victoria Beckham’s daughter Harper a gift of the book Peter and the Wolf, which Bono worked on for the charity in 2003.
Since 2003, the Peter and the Wolf project has raised €993,006 for the Irish Hospice Foundation.
With more than 2.5 million followers, Victoria Beckham’s tweet was seen by a substantial number of people. It included a picture of the book’s cover along with a link to the hospice’s website.
The message said: "Thanks Bono and Ali for Harper’s supercool Peter and the Wolf book! donate at bit."
As a result of the Beckham tweet, there was so much traffic to the charity’s website that it collapsed for about an hour.
Since then, it has been inundated with enquiries from people looking to buy the book.
Caroline Lynch, a spokeswoman for the foundation, said the charity was extremely grateful for the extra publicity in the current climate.
"We haven’t generated any publicity for the book in the last few years so the recent interest in it and the sales are directly linked to the Beckham tweet.
"Since Victoria’s tweet, we have sold six books and a poster print costing €100. We had about a dozen direct enquiries about sales last Friday. Since then we have had a steady flow of enquiries. People can now buy it online on www.thankyouday.ie."
Ms Lynch said the charity’s fundraising team were hopeful the publicity would generate further interest in the project and promote further sales in the coming weeks.
"We sold some books, people phoned or emailed their order, and received a lot of enquiries on the Friday after the tweet. There was also a lot of traffic on our Facebook page and Victoria’s tweet was trending on Friday."
The charity is hoping the publicity will help raise the extra €7,000 it needs to reach the €1m mark.
The foundation receives no state funding and needs to raise about €5m every year to support its programmes, which include a range of bereavement activities and the Children’s Hospice Home Care Programme.
* IHF is urging human resource managers to attend the seminars on grief it is running from Feb 21 to April 3: hospice-foundation.ie.
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