Greene King - Logo

Rob keithley, business development manager, hungry horse

Rob Keithley is a Business Development Manager for the Hungry Horse brand and helped to raise the highest ever amount for Macmillan, despite Covid restrictions being in place.

rob-keithley.jpg 

I’m usually a very busy person. Working as a business development manager (BDM) covering Cheshire, Staffordshire, Derbyshire and some of Shropshire, I cover a lot of miles during a normal working week, so when Covid-19 struck and I was furloughed I really didn’t know what to do with myself.

I’ve been working in the hospitality sector all my working life, and most of that has been in pubs. I’m a people person, and work is a huge part of my life. I’m always happy to go above and beyond and put in extra hours, so I found pub closures tough. I threw myself into volunteering for a charity, cooking and delivery meals to elderly and vulnerable people. It was great to build relationships within my own local community.

Charity struggles

Part of my job is helping general managers to look at entertainment and events options. This was really difficult during a pandemic with Covid restrictions in place. Sport stopped, live music wasn’t allowed and our main charity events for Macmillan May couldn’t go ahead because of lockdown.

Macmillan, our national charity partner, is a cause close to my heart because both my parents died from cancer. In fact, I’m unofficially known as ‘Macmillan Task Force Commander’ because I co-ordinate a lot of the fundraising events. Charities were really suffering from lack of fundraising due to Covid, and Macmillan was pretty desperate, but the question was, what could we do to help?

I came up with some ideas, but we were nervous: would people put money in a bucket if everyone was avoiding handling cash during the pandemic? Would customers donate if they were worried about their incomes? How could we even run events with restrictions in place?

Get appy

Technology came to the rescue. We trialled Rock And Roll Bingo™ – a really fun music quiz with bursts of music instead of numbers being called. It’s all done via an app, and we tested it out with our own teams. I promoted it on our Kingdom app and we offered great prizes, like big TVs, to encourage people to get behind it. It went well: there was a lot of energy and excitement, and that helped pub teams to sell the idea on to customers.

We ran it on a Saturday night in September. At that point pubs were really quiet, so I was anxious. I popped along to one of our pubs to see how it was going down, and it was brilliant; socially distanced of course, with only six allowed per table, but the atmosphere was great. We had a really good night and raised about £9,000.

Fun and games

During the third winter lockdown when pubs were all shut, I tried a new online quiz event. I’m not a huge quizzer myself, but joined in with one and really enjoyed it. The organisers were in a studio managing everything remotely via screens so they could view participants. If they saw people enjoying themselves they shone a spotlight on them for everyone to see. It was a bit like the TV show Gogglebox, and it created a really good, high energy community atmosphere.

I decided it would be good fun for our team members to try. So, I ran a trial session with managers and teams from across Hungry Horse, and it was a great success. I knew then that we were onto something. Next we decided to do a Macmillan event and advertised it on Kingdom. We had over 200 Greene King employees join us for the first event, including many of the executive board members. Of course, the spotlight fell on our CEO, Nick Mackenzie, who seemed to be really getting into it! Some people dressed up in Macmillan green and there were banners and balloons… it was absolutely fantastic.

We raised £23,000 and so I decided to take the quiz to customers via a Facebook event. It was wild. The event went on until 1am and became a bit like a party towards the end – people were going crazy. It was clear that with pubs closed, the public were desperate to enjoy themselves, somehow.

Greene King raised over £1.1 million for Macmillan during September and October 2020 and £1.5 million overall. That’s the highest figure we’ve ever achieved for a fundraising campaign in nine years of supporting them, and I’m absolutely blown away by it. To have been able to help people have a good time during a time of worry and uncertainty, while doing good for a great charity, was just amazing.