Tate's Buy a Brushstroke pixel ads campaign raises £550,000
Howard Lake | 1 March 2007 | News
A fundraising appeal launched by The Art Fund and Tate in January has raised over £550,000 online from 11,000 donors with the result that Turner’s painting ‘The Blue Rigi ‘ has been saved for the nation. The ‘Buy A Brushstroke’ campaign emulated the successful pixel ad income generation campaign of Alex Tew’s milliondollarhomepage.com.
According to the Tate, this campaign has been “one of the most successful public appeals ever”.
Members of the public have been pledging their support by ‘buying a brushstroke’ for £5 each from The Blue Rigi, by visiting a special website created by The Art Fund for online donations, as well as by telephone and post.
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Donations have been received from all over the UK and there have also been contributions from as far away as Singapore, United States, Japan, Russia and Australia.
Sufficient funds had to be raised before 20 March otherwise the painting would have been exported following its purchase in June 2006 by an overseas collector.
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.