8:46 am, November 19, 2020
MotorVise has answered automotive charity Ben’s call to help meet a £1m funding shortfall by launching a Xmas Do-nation appeal.
Ben issued an urgent plea for help yesterday (Nov 18), saying it was trying to cope with soaring demand in the face of the million-pound drop in income, as reported by Car Dealer.
Now MotorVise, which helps dealers increase revenue, profitability and customer loyalty, says it will give Ben the £1,000 it was going to spend on its now-cancelled staff Christmas ‘do’.
Daksh Gupta, Ben’s vice-president and group managing director of Marshall Group Ltd, has also pledged £10,000 from the business.
Fraser Brown, pictured right, founder and managing director of MotorVise, said: ‘That’s an amazing gesture and a fantastic way to start the ball rolling by supporting a charity that cares for so many people across our industry.’
He and sales director Nick Coyle, pictured left, worked out that if the UK’s 4,500 franchised dealerships each donated £200 of the cash set aside for the Christmas parties cancelled because of the pandemic, it’d raise more than £900,000.
If non-franchised dealerships and other associated businesses matched that, they reckon Ben could not only meet the shortfall, it would also generate the extra money needed to deal with the increasing demand for its services.
Ben fundraising director Matt Wigginton said: ‘I’d like to thank Fraser and everyone at MotorVise for being so quick to respond and to Daksh Gupta for his incredibly generous ‘Do-nation’.”
Gupta said: ‘Ben needs our support and I urge everyone within the industry to do the right thing and dig deep.’
Brown added: ‘We are naturally disappointed at not being able to hold a staff party, and having already set aside the £1,000 cost, we decided Ben was a deserving destination for that money.
‘We’d really like to see, across the whole nation, automotive businesses donate a proportion of the money they would have spent on a Christmas party to our “Do-nation” appeal, because right now this charity and the people in our industry need that support more than ever.’
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