The Apprentice Challenge 2019 – a great fundraising initiative
This innovative corporate fundraising initiative is part of a charity of the year partnership with OmniServ and its travel retail division Blackjack Promotions, that was announced at the beginning of 2019. Both QEF and OmniServ are committed to making air travel accessible for everyone.
The teams at Omniserv and BlackJack promotions came up with the inventive idea to get staff across the companies to compete with each other and raise as much money as possible for QEF in the process. The challenge they chose was inspired by the popular BBC One programme The Apprentice and QEF gave the go ahead for them to take over different charity shops in Surrey to enable this challenge to come to life.
6 teams were created with names such Excellence, Collabroation and Innovation. Each team was allocated a QEF charity shop each on a specific week day between 1st-8th November. They were challenged to raise as much money as possible between 2-4pm and they could re-merchandise, change, promote and be as inventive as possible in their ideas in order to sell as many pre-loved items as possible. The teams were competing against each other and will be judged on three different aspects of the challenge:
– how much money they managed to raise
– who created the best looking shop window (as voted by the public)
– how many people they managed to sign-up to gift aid.
There were so many exciting things the teams got stuck into, from free face painting for children, interactive shop windows, raffles for Ryanair flights , online donation pages, pomegranate mocktails, star items for sale, dressing up as life size snowmen and bananas and lots of cake!
The challenge was a great initiative and everyone involved thoroughly enjoyed themselves. QEF, OmniServ and Blackjack promotions are eagerly waiting for the 10th December when the winners will be announced, and the total amount of money raised will be revealed. In the meantime the best dressed shop windows are being judged by the public via social media.
Antony Marke, Managing Director of Omniserv Group said “At OmniServ, we are constantly working to ensure that travel is accessible for everyone, regardless of their assistance needs. As such, we are delighted to be supporting the vital work that QEF does, in line with those same values. I’m looking forward to taking on the Lord Sugar role – but it’s all in the name of fun and at the end of the day no one will be getting fired!”
All the staff and volunteers at QEF want to say a huge thank you to OmniServ and Blackjack Promotions. Everyone enjoyed themselves and the general public came out of our stores very happy with their new purchases, all whilst knowing what a great cause they were supporting. Thank you for all the time and effort that was put in to creating such a fun and interesting QEF Apprentice Challenge!
