In November, three young people participated in 11 Million Takeover Day, shadowing David Bull at UNICEF UK. As part of the day, they conducted an interview with him to get insight into his job.
What’s the most creative or inspirational contribution you’ve made to UNICEF?
David Bull: That’s a very difficult question! I started something called the ‘Common Approach’ which is about how we work together as people in the organisation. It is about trusting & respecting each other and about managers enabling their employees to achieve their objectives in what they believe is the best way. So giving staff empowerment to do their jobs and be creative even though sometimes that means that mistakes might be made; that’s okay if you’re trying to do the right thing and trying to achieve your goals. That was one contribution I made at an organisational level when I came here.
What aspect of your job is the most difficult?
Um... answering your questions! Well, I suppose finding the right words and media to get the message across in Britain about what we do and the needs and rights that children have, because people in our society get bombarded by so much information these days through different media - newspapers, radio, television, online etc. There are 180, 000 charities and all the companies that are trying to promote their products, so everybody is getting too much information.
How do we, as an organisation, manage to tell our special story in a way which doesn’t just go in one ear and out the other, but actually motivates people to do something and lodges in between ears and causes some action to take place? I think that it’s really difficult! We have a very good Communications Team here; they do a fantastic job and give us lots of expert advice on how to do those things. Moreover, I spend a lot of my time talking with people either in the media or who are potential donors and supporters and talking to governments about what UNICEF is doing and what they should be doing for the worlds children. It’s always a big challenge to get your message across very clearly.
How influential is UNICEF in improving the lives of children worldwide?
I think we are very influential, and do an extremely good job, but it’s never enough. There are about 3 billion children under 18 in the world, and that’s a big task. We are responsible for trying to help to improve the lives and give protection and give rights to all of those children; they all have the same rights under the CRC.
We have country offices and programmes in over 150 developing countries and 36 industrialised countries. In all of those UNICEF staff spends a lot of time talking to the government about what children’s needs and problems are and how the government can contribute to making it better. So we’re not all about just doing direct charitable projects on the ground, we’re also about using those projects as examples of how to do things in a better way and then trying to persuade governments to adopt those.
For example, here in the UK this year we produced a report on child wellbeing in industrialized countries, in which the UK came bottom. Children in the UK have a harder time than children in other rich countries; this was the conclusion of this report. So we organised a conference and got some young people and experts together to write a declaration about child wellbeing in UK and what we need to do to make it better, and got all the political parties - Labour, Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats - to sign up to that declaration and support it. So that’s an example of the kind of influence that we can have, but this same thing is happening in 160 different countries in the world. So I think it’s influential, but given the number of children and young people there are in the world and the range of issues and problems they face, especially in poorer countries, it’s very hard for us ever to feel that we are influential enough.
What was the most successful fundraising event you’ve ever organized? Why was it so successful?
I think the most successful fundraising events are the ones which raise a lot of money, but also a lot of awareness and interest and get our message across. So I’ll give you one example which was around the time of the World Cup. We did a thing called Soccer Aid on the television – I don’t know if you saw it - on ITV where Robbie Williams was the captain of one team and Gordon Ramsay of the other team, and they played a match at Old Trafford, Manchester United’s ground. I think we raised about £2.5 million, from the tickets for the game and from people phoning in to the television programme. Ant and Dec were presenting it; it was on for about a week, if you remember. But also it was a great event because it raised a lot of awareness about UNICEF, a lot of people saw it and we made a series of short films where celebrities were talking about particular projects in particular countries that we wanted to support. These films were shown during the course of the week, with millions of people watching, so they all saw some information about the kind of work that we do in developing countries, as well as helping us to raise money, so that made it a good event.