Using celebrities to enhance and protect your

reputation

• How do you pick them?

• How do you manage them?

• How can they help protect and build your reputation?

• What you can do if it goes wrong?

• Celebrity “scandal”

How do you pick them?

• Research, research, research

• Common sense

• The charity brand, this will be different for every organisation

• If a celeb is known to be controversial think hard about using them

How do you manage celebrities to minimise risk to your brand?

• Brief them to be on brand

• Make them aware of any developments

• Develop a good relationship with your CEO

• Make them feel a part of the charity

How can they help protect and build your reputation?

• What sort of reputation do you want?

• Always on message, always on brand

• Celebrities have a lot of platforms to speak out from;

personal websites, twitter, youtube

• A personal connection, the pubic can see through someone reading from a script

• There is a difference between the role of a supporter and a named Patron role.

What you can do if it goes wrong?

Think first, what is this scandal how big is it really?

• Have their actions affected other people?

• Does it contradict your charity’s messages and objectives?

• Will it alienate your key audiences?

• How does the celebrity react to the “scandal”?

Think next, how tied to your charity is the celebrity?• Do they have a named title, are they a President or Patron,

did they set up the charity?

• Were they photographed last week at an event laughing and joking with your CEO?

• Do you actually need to make a comment on them to internal or external audiences?

• Remember, whether or not the celebrity supports your charity will be unlikely to be dwelled on in the news story as a whole.

• Will you stick by them? When the scandal passes they could be more loyal to you than ever.

• Have a plan in place, do you have a strategy?

• Can you say to an internal audience, yes we did our risk assessments?

• Always be gracious and acknowledge the good work they did in the past.

• Don’t be drawn into comment, stick to the charity brand messaging.

If you do decide you need to distance yourself from them;

Let’s look at some examples of celebrity “Scandals”

Group discussion – How damaging are these celebrity “scandals”?

Thank you