Telethon phone chaos cost us $450,000, says charity
Eddie Luk, Hong Kong iMail
A MEDICAL charity claims it lost at least $450,000 in donations when its Sunday prime-time television fund-raiser suffered a 45-minute telephone glitch.
The Hong Kong Marrow Match Foundation lost the promises of money when 60 Pacific Century CyberWorks-donated hotlines failed to cope with the number of people trying to dial the call centre of TVB's Light Up A Life show.
Hosted by radio DJ Candy Chea Suk-mui, the two-hour telethon featured edited highlights from the Marrow Match Foundation's ``Light Up A Life'' fund-raising concert at the Hong Kong Coliseum, Hung Hom, on June 2 with performances from singing stars Andy Lau Tak-wah, Dicky Cheung Wai-kin, CoCo Lee and Stephen Chiau Sing-chi.
It also included interviews with people with bone marrow transplants.
Once organisers realised the phone system was unable to cope, PCCW was informed and acted swiftly to remedy the situation.
But even though the charity, which was using the event to celebrate its 10th anniversary, lost 45 minutes of call time, the foundation still managed to raise more than $550,000.
Foundation vice-president Dr Brian Hawkins said without the telephone fault he believed they could have raised more than $1 million.
Dr Hawkins recognised that the problem was caused by the popular response to the appeal and a lack of telephone line capacity, a factor for which PCCW had apologised. ``We will not be requesting compensation from PCCW, but we are very sorry for those callers who wanted to make donations,'' he said.
Donor co-ordinator Joanna Kwok Chu-oi said they realised there was a problem with the phones soon after the show began at 8.30pm.
``For the first 30 minutes there were only a couple of calls as the phones stopped ringing before the volunteers could answer.
``It was only when we tried to ring the number ourselves that we realised that the hotline number was not working,'' she said.
Miss Kwok said there had been complaints from people disappointed that they had been unable to make pledges.
``Even this morning [Monday], we received many complaints from people who were unable to get through.
``After all the hard work, goodwill and voluntary effort that went into this event it is really quite disappointing that the end result should be let down by a failure of the telephone system.''
A spokesman for PCCW said: ``The massive number of calls blocked the hotline telephone system. Once we realised this, we redistributed the incoming calls through different exchanges which eased the problem.
``We regret this happened and have apologised to the foundation.''
Although PCCW chairman Richard Li Tzar-kai did not make a direct donation to the charity, his company had given the hotline service free of charge, the spokesman added.
People can still make donations via the Bank of East Asia.
19 June 2001 / 01:53 AM
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