New charitable wedding list service raises funds from guests
Howard Lake | 4 May 2004 | News
The Alternative Wedding List is an online wedding list service, where instead of toasters and kettles, couples sign-up to a list that contains gifts of donations to various charities.
This new service allows those engaged couples that already have everything in their homes they could possibly want to use their big day for the benefit of others.
The service works the same as any other online wedding list. First, couples register online and send their guests details of where their list is held. Then guests logon to the couple’s list, select a gift from the those available, pay via a secure payment link and receive a receipt for their purchase. Couples can logon to their list at any time to view purchases and messages from guests, and then receive a final certificate confirming how much their guests donated to each charity.
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Gifts range in price from £25 upwards. Each gift purchased represents a donation to the charity whose gift a guest has selected. For example, £27 pays for a gift to Sight Savers International to allow them to pay for a cataract operation for a child in Bangladesh, while £50 would buy a gift to Save the Children to allow them to buy a set of winter clothes for a child in Serbia.
Andy Hickey, founder of The Alternative Wedding List, said: “we think there’s a gap in the market for couples who don’t need more toasters and who would like to feel good about the gifts that their guests buy. We claim back Gift Aid from the Inland Revenue on behalf of the charities. We use some of this to run the service and forward the rest on to the charities along with 100% of the original donation.”
Launched at last week’s Charityfair in London, The Alternative Wedding List says that charities already signed-up to the service include Help the Aged, Marie Curie Cancer Care, Save the Children and Sight Savers International.
The Alternative Wedding List Limited has been set-up as a non-profit making company.
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.