Leonard Cheshire testimonial transcript

Hi, my name is Emma Pearce. I’m Head of Regional Fundraising, and I work at Leonard Cheshire. We’ve been working with Straightahead for just over six months. As a regional fundraising team, we had a remit of trying to identify charity partners in the local area that we worked. We were starting on a clean sheet. We’d never done this before and we identified a number of different ways in which we could approach companies.

We hadn’t, to be fair, thought about looking at telesales in any way whatsoever until we came across Straightahead at a business networking event. Through their presentation, we were inspired to talk to them further about the ways in which they could get through to companies for us and engage more companies in order to build our charity partnership network.

Their approach to getting to know a company is very much about relationship building. When we sat down together and talked through what we wanted to get out of the charity partnerships, the reasons why we wanted to contact certain companies, they asked very pertinent questions. They wanted to be in a position whereby they could get through to the right person at the company and that they could also answer any type of question that the caller might have asked. They really wanted to get to the nitty gritty of who we were and what were the benefits of having a charity partnership with Leonard Cheshire.

One of the advantages of working with Straightahead was that we had weekly reports; we were able to see summary reports in terms of the conversations that they’d had. It’s been a very successful partnership and I would highly recommend Straightahead.