Comic Relief helped by someone else's viral e-mail

Howard Lake | 30 November 1999 | News

Comic Relief admitted that part of their success was due to a viral e-mail message – and it wasn’t one of theirs.

Comic Relief have admitted that their stunning success raising £400,000 online in March this year was helped by someone else’s viral e-mail campaign. Sarah Heseltine told Internet magazine: “We conduct offline press and PR, yet the thing that generated the most interest was an e-mail started by someone else.”

She added: “someone took content from the site and e-mailed round to a massive amount of people. We were getting calls about this e-mail and we were saying “What e-mail?” It shows what we could have achieved if we’d sent out that e-mail ourselves.”

While there are alarming elements to such a campaign – no charity wants to be associated with spamming – it is good to see that a major online fundraising charity has now woken up to the significance of e-mail as a fundraising tool. E-mail can work effectively both as a direct communication tool to supporters and donors, and those very same supporters can be encouraged to spread the word legitimately by way of so-called viral e-mail.

Perhaps the 2001 Comic Relief campaign will act on this lesson and employ e-mail more extensively. It will by then be the fourth Comic Relief campaign which will have used the Web. With any luck they will deploy e-mail, that other essential element of Internet fundraising, and move away from a focus solely on the Web.

• Coming soon (3 December 1999)
  
• 'Inconspicuous consumption' – charity shop research (5 December 1999)
  
• Speculate and accumulate (7 December 1999)
  

About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale. He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.