A History of a Charity in Twenty Objects - #15
#15. Phone Fax Machine (November 2005)
On a single day in November 2005, we got an office, a phone number and this phone (which is also a fax machine). It was a big day!
It was exciting – and still is – to have a phone number. What’s even more exciting is when people actually call us! A single phone call can change everything. And it often has. In fact, we’ve had a few phonecalls that have changed our trajectory entirely.
One such phone call happened in February 2008. The caller asked to speak to someone in our Corporate Partnership Department. We didn’t actually have a Corporate Partnership Department. Truth be told, we didn’t have ANY departments – just two people in a very, very cold office.
Assuming it was a telemarketer, we asked, “How may I help you?”
The caller, who was Patsy Francis of the Community Affairs Team at UBS, told us she’d seen our work and would like to arrange a meeting to learn more.
A week or so later, Kourtney found herself in a conference room at UBS, drinking coffee and eyeing up a plate of delicious-looking biscuits, as she presented our work to Patsy.
Patsy listened attentively, asked a few questions, and, when Kourtney was finished, invited us to submit a project proposal to the decision-making committee at UBS. If they decided to support it, UBS would become our very first corporate partner!
Well, the decision-making committee at UBS said ‘yes’ (yippee!) and, to paraphrase Casablanca, that was the beginning of a beautiful corporate partnership.
UBS were saying ‘yes’ to a lot more than just a funding proposal. For us, their support would be another big step on our journey to financial independence — as well as an education in working with big corporate funders.
During that first project, ‘How the World REALLY Works: Investment Banking’, we learned A LOT about working with corporate partners: communication, volunteer management, what to expect, what to demand, when to push back, how to manage the needs of a huge company without being overwhelmed – especially when there are 3 of you and 7,000 them – and how to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with your corporate partner so that, together, you can make the greatest impact.
In the first five years of our partnership, we developed five books with UBS, and in 2012, our partnership won a Lord Mayor’s Dragon Award. As the first corporate partner to support our ‘How the World REALLY Works’ book project, it’s no surprise that they are now the first to support our ‘How the World REALLY Works’ video project, which launched in December 2021.
Since that phonecall in February 2008, we have partnered with UBS, Lloyd’s of London, Catlin, Norton Rose Fulbright, Arsenal Football Club, Blackstone Chambers, Olswang LLP, Berkeley Research Group, Royal Sun Alliance, MoreThan, Schroders, Taylor Wessing, The City of London Corporation, Jones Day, Berkeley Research Group and Willis Towers Watson on book projects that have explored lots of different legal, financial and historical topics.
Nearly every one of those partnerships started with… you guessed it, a phone call!
There’s not much use for a phone with a fax machine any more, and we’ve upgraded to a cordless handset (a hand-me-down from one of our volunteers). This machine is now more suitable for a museum than an office, but it certainly has played its part in our story!
As for us, whenever our phone rings, we will always answer it with a sense of possibility.
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