Covent Garden Food Co. Supports the British Heart Foundation

In February 2010 and 2011, Covent Garden Soups and the British Heart Foundation teamed up for the charity's 'National Heart Month'. They came together and created a soup which would be 'good for the heart'. This included making sure that the nutritional traffic lights; Fat, Sat Fat, Sugar and Salt were all green/low as such the creation has come to include Tomatoes, Vegetable and Lentils. This became Covent Gardens 'Soup of the Month' for February and because of its popularity this soup still continues to have a presence on supermarket shelves.

For both February 2010 and 2011, Covent Garden pledged £10,000 of the soups sales to the British Heart Foundation and with prices at only £1.99 I'm not surprised it flew off the shelves with 500,000 cartons being sold already.

This is a creative and innovative way to support the British Heart Foundation, Covent Garden is one of the, if not the soup retailer for Britain and by allowing the public to gain something when donating to charity, something just as simple as a bowl of soup, that I feel is when charitable marketing is at its best.

Celebrities Dive into the Deep Blue Sea for Cancer Research

Samsung have teamed up with a Cancer Research fundraising event which hopes to raise £1,000,000 for the charity. Today, ten celebrities including Jenny Frost and  Ronan Keating started the 56 miles relay swim between Holyhead (Wales) and Dublin (Ireland), with Ronan taking the first plunge. They will complete the crossing in what is expected to take a total of '30-40 hours'. This crossing is 'three times the length of the English channel' where they will be up against more than the temperature of the water as the variety of sea life and choppy waters will make the task ahead of them even more challenging.

(Richard Branson was originally supposed to co-lead the team however due to the recent fire on his property he had to pull out)

Alongside the donations pledged through Cancer Research, Samsung have pledged an additional £3,500 for every mile the team swims. In addition, the swim will be documented on Samsung Galaxy S II smart phones and Galaxy 10.1 tablets. Not only is this a great way to help a wonderful charity which supports a disease that arguably affects everyone in one way or another, but it is also great exposure for the electronics giant. More and more companies are seeing the benefit of associating themselves with charities, especially celebrity driven campaigns which tend to be broadcast and documented on a wider scale allowing greater exposure. This in turn generates greater returns for Charities as these for-profit companies can help monetarily and help raise further awareness. All in all these are great partnership for both parties, which I believe we'll see more and more of.

We'll have to wait and see if Cancer Research successfully reach their goal, maybe Samsung's pledge will help push them over that threshold.

Charities Braced For Difficult Period Among Government Cuts

Recent Government decisions to cut back funding or withdraw it entirely in the voluntary sector is causing problems for more than 2,000 charities who are being forced to close services or lay-off staff. The report has been compiled by the union-backed anti-cuts campaign 'False Economy' and reveals that Children's and Young People charities will be the hardest hit with more than 380 organisations hit. 

The report estimates that £110 million will be removed from charities' bottom line this coming year alone. However, this analysis does not include information from major cities i.e. Manchester & Leeds etc, so this figure is likely to rise quite significantly once this has been taken into account.