BEN wins Twitter free PR contest

BEN, the automotive industry charity, has won £13,000-worth of free PR support through Automotive PR's #tweetcharity competition. The competition, which ran exclusively on Twitter – from nominations to voting – reached more than 650,000 users, with hundreds of tweets for the shortlisted charities, including from television presenter Mike Brewer, the official Twitter feeds of Help for Heroes and Best Western Hotels, as well as from famous racing drivers Derek Bell MBE, the five-times Le Mans winner, and Ben Collins, formerly ‘The Stig' on the BBC's Top Gear.

BEN, which was founded in 1905, is the automotive industry’s dedicated charity. It offers practical and financial help, support, advice and friendship to those who work, or have worked, in the automotive and related industries and to their family dependants.

Nigel Rothband, BEN’s Chief Operating Officer commented, 

“Automotive PR’s #tweetcharity competition is a fantastic initiative as it created exposure for all of the deserving causes shortlisted. To have been nominated alongside such a group was an honour in itself, but to have won the prize is absolutely phenomenal. Raising awareness is BEN’s single biggest challenge and having the professional expertise of Automotive PR’s team will enable us to combat this. We are honoured to have the opportunity to partner with such a respected organisation and, together, will deliver a strategy to raise awareness which will enable us to help even more of our industry colleagues.

“We wouldn’t be celebrating this success without the volume of votes we received and we can’t give enough thanks to all those who participated. We are truly overwhelmed by the response and messages of support; a real testament to the industry’s commitment to our services.” 

Marco Ferrari, Managing Director of Automotive PR, said: “We are thrilled for BEN and are delighted that we will be working to raise awareness of its fantastic achievements. We know that #tweetcharity increased the profile of all the shortlisted charities and are grateful for the huge support that the competition received from across and outside the industry from all those who voted.

“We’d also like to thank both Newspress and Headlineauto for their support in promoting the competition, as well as Sentiment Metrics, which allowed us to monitor and analyse the votes fairly and accurately.”