Wedding List Giving now open to new charities
Howard Lake | 14 February 2005 | News
Following its pilot year in which it helped raise £25,000 from weddings for UK charities, Wedding List Giving is opening its doors to new charities.
Holly Long, Director of Wedding List Giving, aims to make giving a regular and more prominent feature of British weddings. “There are around 250,000 weddings every year in England and Wales alone and the average wedding costs over £15,000,” she explained. “If we can direct just a fraction of this multi-billion pound ‘industry’ to charity each year, we will have made a huge impact.”
Wedding List Giving promotes and administers a scheme in which wedding guests donate to a charity or charities selected by bridal couples. It has already helped raise funds for Amnesty International, Cancer Research UK, Oxfam and Tearfund.
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During its pilot year, the organisation discovered that 25% of couples opted to receive no gifts at all, choosing instead to invite their guests to donate all of their intended gift budgets to charity. The remaining 75% of couples chose to have both a traditional gift list and a donation to charity as part of their wedding.
Wedding List Giving operates on a not-for-profit basis and has now capped its administration fees for charities, setting a nominal sum of £50 or 5% or dontations per wedding, whichever amount is smaller. The organisation passes information on which enables the charities to claim gift aid.
Wedding List Giving is now enouraging other charities to take part. At the same time it is encouraging more couples to take part by offering a prize draw for an anniversary weekend for two in Venice to those couples who register and use the service in 2005.
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.