Much excitement at Launch Towers this week as the teams behind the inspiring Scott-Amundsen Centenary Race to the Pole recreation met TRH Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.

Earlier this year the five team members completed their arduous trek, covering 920 miles in the process. Incredibly, the Scott team reached the South Pole 100 years to the day as Captain Scott did, before he began his ill-fated return trip.

The Duke is patron of the expedition and joined team members in London to show his support. As you might expect, there was much media attention focused on Kate’s attire but when Prince William held the oh-so-cute three week old Hugo Vicary, son of Scott team member Vic Vicary, the media and social media sphere went into overdrive.

Fantastic front page coverage followed for the Legion, with much of it mentioning the heroic efforts of Lt Col Henry Worsley and his Army team-mates in raising funds for The Royal British Legion’s Battle Back Centre.

The expedition raised a staggering £160,000. And Team Poppy at Launch has been honoured to be involved and supporting them every step of the way…

If you’ve been in a recent meeting at Launch Towers you will have experienced the influx of new, rare wildlife which have inhabited the agency…..  a series a hairy caterpillars that have made their homes on the upper lips of our male Launchers.  And might I say they are very impressive!!!  Account Director, Dan, is leading the way for money raised (if not for bushiest mo) whilst Director, Andy, is streets ahead with his full-on Magnum-style tash.  The team, led by Mo Bro Account Director, Mark, has raised £215 so far to help increase vital funds and awareness for men’s health, specifically prostate cancer and other cancers that affect men.  But they still need more!  You can donate here.

Mo Sister, Katie

Today’s date (11.11.11), a perfect palindrome and a particularly poignant Armistice Day as the Royal British Legion commemorates its 90th Anniversary. To say it’s been busy at Launch Towers would be an understatement. The RBL team has been working relentlessly in the lead up to Remembrance Sunday securing media opportunities left right and centre. With too many to mention individually, I’ve compiled a few highlights from the last couple of weeks.

Boris meets Doris

Boris Johnson appeared with Launch’s very own Harriet ‘Doris’ Murphy to launch London Poppy Day, the largest single fundraising day in the capital with servicemen and volunteers aiming to raise over £500,000 in just 12 hours. Thanks to Harriet (and of course Boris), the pictures made it to page 2 of the Evening Standard and kick started the media frenzy…

London Poppy Day

Question: What do you get if you cross nearly 1,000 men in uniform and a load of poppies. The answer is London Poppy Day, a PR dream and enormous honour.

The largest fundraising day started with a bang with Launch’s illustrious team leader Rebecca running round London trying to coordinate service personnel, beneficiaries, route master buses, Olympic cyclists and a number of national film crews. Whoever said working with children and animals was difficult should speak to Rebecca about coordinating the PR for London Poppy Day! Joined at her side by media hound Charlie who was last seen running after the TFL commissioner’s routemaster bus as it left without her and the BBC London film crew who had come down to film the bus! Thankfully she caught up with it and the team achieved some astounding coverage (personally some of the best I’ve ever witnessed) including numerous broadcast interviews with BBC London News and ITV News.

Piggybacking the news agenda

A particularly great piece of ‘PR piggybacking’ also occurred. Cue ITV News broadcasting a piece on the opening of a new road in the city complete with vintage cars driving down Regent Street. I can only imaging their PR team’s frustration as some rather dashing soldiers holding trays of poppies appear in the back of the vintage cars. Sorry!

May the force(s) be with you

To mark the end of London Poppy Day with a total of nearly £450,000 raised in just 12 hours, the team headed down to Leadenhall Market for a glass of wine with the soldiers. Without giving too much away, we lost an umberella and gained a few friends…..my lips are sealed *ahem*!

Shoulder to Shoulder

In true ‘All Channel PR’, some phenomenal digital work as we also launched Shoulder to Shoulder. The RBL team capitalised on the random appearance of Suggs in the building and added to the virtual wall of Remembrance alongside the Saturday’s, Lorraine Kelly, Barbara Windsor, Andy Murray to name a few. The number of people currently standing shoulder to shoulder is 17,000  but is increasing by the day.

From Cupcakes to Bling….Poppies take over the world!

Any of you watching  Live with Gaby today will have seen Flossie cup cakes for Remembrance Day and Recipes for Remembrance….massive well done to Larissa, the relentless phonecalls have paid off! Twitter also went crazy last weekend with the airing of Strictly Come Dancing and the X-Factor….well done to Charlie who couldn’t physically have featured more poppies on primetime TV if she had tried!!

And finally… today the team went down to Silence in the Square. A truly moving experience for me personally given that my grandfather died serving his country in the Navy. It has been an absolute pleasure to work with the Launch team to achieve the phenomenal amount PR coverage for the Royal British Legion. What a fantastic start to my time at Launch.

This week Launch Group joined The Royal British Legion for this year’s launch of the Poppy Appeal 2011.

This year marks the 90th anniversary of The Royal British Legion and to celebrate, the Legion is calling for the nation to stand shoulder to shoulder with serving and ex-Service personnel and show their support by wearing a poppy.

Whether it’s the traditional poppy or a virtual poppy, the long standing symbol of The Royal British Legion remains a powerful reminder of those who have served and still serve the Armed Forces.

This year, the team are helping to get the word out about  The Shoulder to Shoulder app, which enables people to upload a photo of themselves, add a poppy to it and then a message of support to our Armed Forces. Once submitted, the images then appear on the Shoulder to Shoulder virtual wall.

The app launched yesterday and already an amazing 2,800 people have uploaded pictures to show their support.

To show your support, check out the website and follow Shoulder to Shoulder on Twitter.

Well us Launch ladies have done it again! Firstly, we’d like to say a huge congratulations to the ladies who coordinated the whole event, which as usual was a roaring success, and secondly to all the ladies who took part at Battersea Park and made it round the 5k course.

This year marked a decade of Tesco’s support for Race for Life. To celebrate this anniversary we’ve been doing our bit for fundraising and over the last 2 years raised well over £550 to help beat cancer.

Whilst we were out on the course the rest of the Launch team were doing a sterling job to raise as much awareness and coverage for the event as possible, as well as the other 300 Race for Life events happening across the UK from May to the end of July this year.

Needless to say KPIs are already smashed, with coverage achieved on Daybreak, The Metro, Hello and OK! to name a few.

Well done girls, we did it! Time now to don the leg warmers and get into training for next year.

Don’t forget to check out the RFL Twitter feed for all the latest news!

Here at Launch Group we realise that December is typically a gluttonous month focused around consuming vast quantities of food and drink! So, in order to ‘do our bit’ and give back to charity we decided to host a Charity Coffee Morning this week to raise money for The Royal British Legion, one of the most prominent and newsworthy charities and also a client of ours.

In order to get as many people involved as possible, we asked all Launchers to get their baking hats on and create something delicious that would sell in the masses. And we weren’t disappointed….Amongst our baked beauties we had a delicious and handmade coffee cake, decadent (and giant) chocolate brownies, crammed with dark chocolate pieces, and a variety of cookies and cupcakes decorated beautifully with glitter.

As with all sweet treats, the baked goods went down very well with the team, and everyone was very generous. Launch Group managed to raise a very respectable £51.00 for the charity. Eating all those cakes seems all the more acceptable now…

Twitter has become the most important soap-box of the media world – forget reading about gossip in weekly mags and online rags, these days we want it immediately from our favourite ‘slebs smartphone.

It really is a wonder the impact that just 140 characters can make on a campaign.  You can have a steady increase of followers, and then BOOM! Stephen Fry gives you a mention and your figures leap.

Lazy folk don’t even need to write a personal message, they can just retweet somebody, and then your reach automatically widens to their avid followers too.

Celebrity endorsement from shampoo to cars is a multi-billion pound industry with temperamental results, yet the power of a recommendation on Twitter is immense.  Simon Cowell asked the Twittersphere where he could get a Poppy Twibbon (like a bumper plate sticker for your Twitter avatar, a way to show your allegiance to a cause), PoppyLegion (aka us here at Launch!) replied linking to the Official Royal British Legion Twibbon and Simon told his 40,000 followers that he “highly recommends” following PoppyLegion.  The result? 160 people started following Poppy almost immediately. 

It is also a great outlet for enquiries; after the X Factor gang wore personalised sparkly poppies, everyone wanted to know where to get one.  As a result, they completely sold out (raising massive amounts for the Poppy Appeal) particularly after Dannii Minogue and The Saturdays tweeted about how much they loved theirs. 

The charity 2 Minute Silence single is supported by myriad public figures – from sports stars to musicians and politicians – and has created a great Twitter publicity push that reaches a great scope of the population; Thom Yorke reached the alternative crowd, David Tennant called out to his Dr Who devotees and Stephen Fry enlightened his 2 million fans.

In the two weeks of the 2010 Poppy Appeal , PoppyLegion has multiplied her followers by a third, an amazing achievement which I’m sure is down to  the passion for the cause – not just celebrity advocacy…but it sure does help point people in our direction.

So if you too want to join the clique of a media mogul, ex-Prime Minister and top popstars I’d recommend you follow @PoppyLegion too.

A massive congratulations to the Launch Group team who took part in Cancer Research UK’s Race for Life last month.

The 20 strong team joined British athlete Paula Radcliffe and 7,000 other women in Battersea Park to walk, jog and run the 5k course. The team smashed their £300 fundraising target and managed to raise a fantastic £505 to help beat cancer.

The whole team did incredibly well and are already looking forward to next year.

Check out the Supporters’ Network and its Twitter feed for all the latest Race for Life news!

This week Launchers are donating their time to the Heart FM ‘Have A Heart Charity Appeal’ by manning the phones during Heart Breakfast with Jamie Theakston. Every penny raised from the ‘Have a Heart Appeal’ will help sick children living in our communities through the Starlight Children’s Foundation. 

The campaign hopes to make a difference to the lives of seriously ill children across the UK. From the proceeds of the appeal, wishes will be granted to terminally and seriously ill children, making both their lives, and the lives of their families, a little brighter.

Launchers Elodie Massol, Laura Davis and Lesley Belle helped raise over £10,000 this morning. Well done!

This is the fifth year I have been involved in Cancer Research UK’s Race for Life as a Tesco ambassador, and, as always, the Battersea Park event last week was just fantastic. I walked the course with my mum, who is currently undergoing treatment for breast cancer, so this was especially poignant to me this year. It is such a privilege to be able to experience the incredible atmosphere of so many women joined together to support Cancer Research UK’s life-saving work.

I spent the day helping raise awareness for Race for Life as well as increasing participation levels, ultimately with the hope that together we can raise an unprecedented amount of money for Cancer Research UK. I got started early with a BBC Breakfast interview, followed by numerous TV, radio and print interviews. Catch me in Hello magazine and My weekly over the next few weeks!

And of course, I signed the Tesco World’s Largest Trainer and Lord Seb Coe even joined me to add his own good luck message on the shoe.

I’d like to say a really well done to the Launch Group team – over 10 girls took part in the race this year – I think you surpassed yourselves and did incredibly well. 

I cannot wait for next year…see you all again at the start line!!

Paula