Hi there VRUK members, I’ve got a question for you.
What came first? The chicken or the egg?
An age-old debate that will rumble on and on for more years than I will be here!
Another question for you......
Which comes first the medal or the charity?
IDEAS
Well, the answer to that question is ‘both!’
We have been lucky enough lately to have had lots of charity nominations from you, our fabulous members, and we use this information to start the ball rolling.
We also have a huge list of Awareness Days that may be National or Worldwide, that we tap into regularly.
Then we have events that will suddenly ‘pop up’ from nowhere! And we’ve all experienced one of those lately, haven’t we?
And of course, we have our secret weapons........Sam and Vicky!!
Let’s face it most of the ideas are floating around in their heads on a daily basis just waiting to POP out and are discussed at a planning session before a creative brief is decided and so the process takes over.
The Process
After Vicky has sketched the creative ideas, off they go to our designer, who will then follow the brief and come up with designs for all our super medals. Do they all become challenges? Well let's see what happens next!
Once Sam and Vicky are happy with the designs, off they go to the factory with their specifications and a mould is made of the medal. A sample will be sent back to Sam and Vicky for approval before full production can commence.
Now this is where it gets interesting everyone, because if you follow Virtual Racing UK closely you will know that these two can spar like Ali and Liston! (EEEK! My P45 could be heading my way!) Come on, they are sisters after all!
Some medals just don’t make the cut for all sorts of reasons.
- Design doesn’t transfer well
- Dull
- Typo’s (this is where Ali and Liston come in)
- Detail not clear
- Not strong enough
And lastly, the girls just wouldn’t be happy with it dropping through their letter boxes let alone their member’s letterboxes!
Once they are both happy, production can start.
The Charities
Sometimes Sam and Vicky have a charity in mind for the designs before they go in to production but often a charity needs to be found and linked to certain challenges.
This is where I can use your nominations and the Awareness Days for research to try to find the correct challenge for Charity.
A simple email, introducing Virtual Racing UK, is the first step in this part of the process and believe me when I say that quite a lot of charities don’t reply, so don’t think we haven’t bothered with your nomination, we have but they may just not have got back to us. Persistence pays off in most cases though.
This is when I can start to link charities to challenges and allocate medals to the appropriate charity, start an agreement to promote the challenge and then launch the challenge for you lovely lot to sign up for.
It’s a great part of my job when the charities do get in touch, especially when we can zoom on the Q&A session, putting faces to names for all our members. It really does help and the passion for what they do really comes across.
The next step is where you, our members, play the biggest part, because without you signing up to our challenges where would VRUK be and those fabulous charities would be left with one less fundraising avenue to go down.
I think we all agree that this process produces some fabulous medals and we help lots of well deserving charities from around the country and in fact charities that are world-wide.
So, hopefully the question has been answered and you know a little more about the process and the way Virtual Racing Uk and our numerous charities work together very successfully.
I will leave you with this........What comes first, the chicken or the egg? Debate!
Carol xx
