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[gileshudson]

Help the RNLI and win 'money can't buy' Mercedes GP Petronas F1 team factory tour tickets

 

Morning all,

 

I'm hoping that the Power Of Blat Chat can help my company, 9 other companies . . . oh and Ross Brawn too . . . to raise money for a new £350,000 RNLI lifeboat on the River Thames.

 

“Why BlatChat?” you may ask . . . well, by donating, one lucky person will win a pair of 'Money Can't Buy' passes for an exclusive tour of the MERCEDES GP PETRONAS Formula One Team factory next year 😬

 

It couldn't be easier to donate. Simply text RNLI to 70099 which will cost you £2, of which 88% will go directly towards funding the purchase and maintenance of a new Thames lifeboat.

 

About the Brawn Lifeboat Challenge

 

Formula 1 mastermind Ross Brawn has joined forces with the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) to raise £350,000 to fund this new lifeboat. In the ‘Brawn Lifeboat Challenge’, teams from some of the UK’s leading businesses pit their entrepreneurial wits against each other in a unique fundraising battle.

 

My parent group, Lloyd's Register, is one of the ten teams competing that are all vying to raise as much money as possible in just eight months. They have all already pitched their strategies to Ross, who is considered to be one of the most inspirational leaders in the UK, and benefited from his advice and extensive experience of working with highly successful teams.

 

The teams have been briefed to turn £1,000 into a profit for the RNLI using their own ingenuity, determination, creativity, teamwork and strategic planning to reach their fundraising targets over the course of the Challenge, which runs until 31 December 2010.

 

We've already done the classic dressdown days at our London and Coventry offices, 180-mile Thames towpath sponsored walk, plus a myriad of other things. This fantastic opportunity will hopefully however be our biggest fundraiser to date.

 

It's ideas for further publicising this opportunity though and not donations from BlatChatters that I'm primarily asking for, although donations are always welcome (and if you'd be kind enough to, then you have a chance to win an exclusive pair of passes for a tour of the MERCEDES GP PETRONAS Formula One Team factory).

 

The tour will take you through the entire production cycle of a Formula 1 car - from the early concept stage, through the design and, yes, the building of it.

 

You cannot buy these tickets anywhere normally; they're one of those 'money can't buy' type opportunities.

 

This is a Lloyd's Register competition and Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd accepts no responsibility, other than to provide the tours as detailed in this offer.

For more details, visit the webpage Win exclusive MERCEDES GP PETRONAS Formula One Team factory tour tickets - Text RNLI to 70099

 

If you did want to give more than £2 then that'd be great, but a Virginmoneygiving website technicality means we can't run the Factory Tour competition on there too, so my 'insider' tip would be, in that case, to send the £2 text anyway (see above) to get the entry to the competition via the text route and then subtract £2 from whatever you choose to subsequently give at our 'Life Matters' page on the Virginmoneygiving.com website.

 

As well as the tickets offered via the texting route above, Ross Brawn has also given us a second pair of tickets to tour the factory in Brackley in 2011 and we are looking to try and raise funds from these too.

 

So the main reason for my post is to ask if you have any contacts or know any Formula 1 fans with deep pockets who may be interested in bidding for a pair of tickets directly.

 

This can be done by submitting a silent bid by e-mail to lifematters@lr.org to arrive by 5pm on Friday 17 December. The subject line must be marked as ‘BRAWN SILENT BID’.

 

As all 10 teams must have submitted all monies raised to the RNLI by 31 December, a condition of this silent auction is that this second pair of tickets will be awarded to the highest bidder contacted after 20 December who can complete by 23 December.

 

Full terms and conditions can be found at the 'Life Matters' Brawn Lifeboat Challenge page on the Lloyd’s Register website.

 

As the MERCEDES GP PETRONAS Formula One Team doesn’t do tours like the ones it is offering here, it has said that the tour tickets will only be issued in winner's chosen names (when contacted).

 

Photographic identification must be provided at the factory on the day of the site tour at Brackley to prove that the ticket holders are those named on the tickets. This is to prevent any possible non-charitable profiteering and commercialisation of these tickets which Ross specifically wants to avoid.

 

Any coverage and spreading the word (and donations) that you could give to this worthy cause would be much appreciated.

 

Cheers,

 

Edited by - gileshudson on 17 Nov 2010 12:18:17