Mencap and Enable to benefit from Blue Peter Appeal
Howard Lake | 19 November 2003 | News
This year’s Blue Peter appeal aims to raise £500,000 for Mencap and its sister charity in Scotland, Enable. Mencap’s Web site offers an impressive tool to help increase the funds raised.
The Blue Peter Get Together Appeal will raise funds to help as many children with a learning disability as possible to go to out of school clubs. The BBC TV children’s programme is encouraging viewers to hold bring and buy sales and sell cards that they have designed to raise funds.
The Mencap Web site helps promote the appeal very well, and is a key element in the design-your-own-card-for-sale activity. It mentions the appeal on its front page, and features a range of information about the appeal and how to get involved. This includes details of how to get your Get Together pack, which has “everything you need to organise a Bring & Buy sale to raise money for the appeal,” plus plus five blank greetings cards for volunteer fundraisers to design and sell. The real innovation is in the online facility to make Get Together greeting cards. Using a Flash programme, you can drag and drop images and text to create your own card, ready for printing out. All cards come with the Blue Peter Get Together logo appearing on the back.
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In the same way you can also create using the Mencap Web site a poster which supporters can make to advertise their Bring & Buy sale. This can be printed out or e-mailed to friends.
Allowing supporters to create drag-and-drop cards is not new. Christian Aid created such a Christmas card service on its Web site in 2002. Mencap’s tool goes further though in allowing supporters to create a card online that is specifically to be sold to raise funds.
When we tried creating a poster online today it seems over 1,000 other people had already used the service.
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.