Comic Relief raises £37 million on Red Nose Day
Howard Lake | 13 March 2005 | News
Red Nose Day 2005 has generated £37,809,564 for Comic Relief, the largest total donated in the 20 years that the campaign has been held.
Based on previous years, the final total is likely to be at least double the amount raised on the night. During the first hour of the telethon £2,197,756 was donated.
Fundraising highlights this year included:
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- over six million red noses were sold this year.
- Comic Relief Does Celebrity Fame Academy, which ran nightly for over a week in the run-up to Red Nose Day, raised £1.3 million through 8.25 million SMS text votes. During the final, the system provided by mobile messaging company Dialogue Communications achieved a voting throughput of 427 votes per second “for sustained periods”.
- HMV has sold over 370,000 copies of a Little Britain/Comic Relief DVD, raising over £1,250,000.
- comedian Peter Kay’s music video for the Tony Christie single “(Is This The Way To) Amarillo” will go on sale on Monday with all proceeds going to Comic Relief.
Unfortunately, the Comic Relief web team took the weekend off after the event, so that by the end of Sunday evening, two days after the telethon the front page of the rednoseday.com site was still proclaiming “Red Nose Day is today”.
There was also an error in the automatic email message sent to online donors: “To find out how your money will be used, please visit http://www.rednoeseday.com/thankyou/” said the message, pointing donors to a non-existent site due to a URL typo.
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.