# Atheist bus campaign enjoys record day on JustGiving - Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/2008/10/22/atheist-bus-campaign-enjoys-record-day-justgiving/ - Published: 2008-10-22T13:50:47+01:00 - Author: Howard Lake **The Atheist Bus Campaign, an appeal by the British Humanist Association to fund posters on the side of London buses, has broken the record on online giving site JustGiving for the most money raised in the shortest time.** ![Atheist Bus Campaign](https://wfay6x.infiniteuploads.cloud/2008/10/atheist_bus_campaign. jpg) The [campaign went live](http://www.justgiving.com/atheistbus) at midnight on 21 October 2008, aiming to raise £5,500. This would pay for posters on 30 buses across the capital for four weeks with the slogan: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” It reached its total after just 10 hours at 10.06. [Donations included £1,000 and £500 donations](https://twitter.com/simondoggett/statuses/969634546). ## Advertisement Here is the JustGiving graph showing the rise in income throughout the first day. ![Graph showing income for Atheist Bus Campaign on JustGiving for 21 October 2008]( https://wfay6x.infiniteuploads.cloud/2026/07/Atheist-bus-campaign-JustGiving-graph. jpg?w=430) Money is still coming in. As I publish this, the total stands at £64,385. Traffic to the JustGiving page has been helped considerably by news coverage on The Guardian, BBC News, and The Register sites. The story also has [69 diggs on digg.com](http://digg.com/arts_culture/London_to_have_Atheist_adverts_on_Buses). JustGiving promise to share some insights into the success of the campaign. They’ve just announced the [one blog alone](http://girlwithaonetrackmind.blogspot.com) has driven more donors than all the posts on Twitter combined. As the [JustGiving blog commented](http://justgiving.wordpress.com/2008/10/21/atheist-bus-campaign):“ Whatever you believe, it certainly shows the power of online fundraising”. A quirky appeal, good PR and a good online donations partner show what can be achieved by organisations large and small. ## WATCH: Richard Dawkins – all aboard the Atheist Bus Campaign _Editor’s update_ _The original bus image had to be changed due to a rights issue over the photo. For a while a free image generator tool was available that let you create any text to appear on the side of the bus._ * **[Sponsor an Executive](https://fundraising.co.uk/2009/01/06/sponsor-executive/)**( 6 January 2009) * **[The Greatest Minds in Advertising Join Forces – Red Nose Day 2009](https://fundraising.co.uk/2009/03/13/greatest-minds-advertising-join-forces-red-nose-day-2009/)**( 13 March 2009) * **[Do you know the way to Kilimanjaro?](https://fundraising.co.uk/2009/03/20/do-you-know-way-kilimanjaro/)**( 20 March 2009) ## Comments ### By: admin - Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/2008/10/22/atheist-bus-campaign-enjoys-record-day-justgiving/#comment-3329 - Published: 2008-10-22T22:12:09+01:00 And those stats/analysis are starting to come in. Justgiving’s Simon Doggett has shared “[Some Cheeky Insider Insights](http://bloggett.com/2008/10/atheist-bus-some-cheeky-insider-insights/)“. BBC News is the top referrer to the Atheist Bus page on Justgiving, followed by Google and then Facebook. “A couple of blogs” have produced a considerable amount of traffic, and “quite a number of people have donated more than once”. Interestingly the Justgiving helpdesk team have been in the rare position of having to “edit offensive comments all day”. ### By: admin - Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/2008/10/22/atheist-bus-campaign-enjoys-record-day-justgiving/#comment-3330 - Published: 2008-10-23T09:48:39+01:00 Supporters of Alpha International, whose posters on London buses led to the Atheist bus campaign by the British Humanist Association, have now created their own Justgiving fundraising campaign: [http://www.justgiving.com/alphaposters](http://www.justgiving.com/alphaposters) They make no reference to the Atheist bus campaign, but they are clearly influenced by it and its success. Their fundraising total is £100,000, way above the BHA’s original £5,500 target, but closer to the Atheist Bus Campaign’s current total of £82,720.57. While the Atheist Bus Campaign is a wonderful example of how quickly and effectively online fundraising campaigns can work (and amid the economic crisis – anyone care to mention ‘donor fatigue’?), it has now got out of hand. Both sides – run the basic poster campaigns you planned but please spend the rest of the cash on something that has a direct and practical charitable impact like cancer care or research. ### By: ianmacquillin - Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/2008/10/22/atheist-bus-campaign-enjoys-record-day-justgiving/#comment-3331 - Published: 2008-10-24T14:36:35+01:00 Just seen the justgiving page have gone there from ‘one blog alone’ (wasn’t expecting that!). Is this not a restricted fundraising appeal? In which case, won’t the British Humanist Association have to spend it all on bus advertising, give back what they don’t spend on bus advertising, or contact every donor individually to ask them if they can spend it on something else? Bus companies must be delighted at the advertising revenue windfall heading their way. ### By: admin - Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/2008/10/22/atheist-bus-campaign-enjoys-record-day-justgiving/#comment-3332 - Published: 2008-10-24T15:47:41+01:00 Jonathan Waddingham of Justgiving has [just reported](http://twitter.com/jon_bedford/statuses/973694518) that “someone has donated \*42\* times to the atheist bus fundraising campaign”. Now that’s an example of regular giving! ### By: admin - Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/2008/10/22/atheist-bus-campaign-enjoys-record-day-justgiving/#comment-3333 - Published: 2008-10-24T16:08:44+01:00 The statisticians at Justgiving keep on sharing. Here’s their latest graph of donations to the atheist bus campaign: [[ They also point out that the campaign has its own [Wikipedia page](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheist_bus_campaign) too. ### By: admin - Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/2008/10/22/atheist-bus-campaign-enjoys-record-day-justgiving/#comment-3334 - Published: 2008-10-24T16:11:00+01:00 The campaign reached £100,000 this afternoon. Not bad for a £5,500 target. And, according to [Justgiving’s Simon Doggett](http://twitter.com/simondoggett/statuses/973799417), it was a £2,000 that took the total past £100,000. My favourite comment from the 64 pages of donor comments? “Et in terra pax a minibus”. ### By: ianmacquillin - Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/2008/10/22/atheist-bus-campaign-enjoys-record-day-justgiving/#comment-3335 - Published: 2008-10-24T18:32:19+01:00 You know Howard, if everyone who contributed to the £101,419.93 raised so far for spending on atheist adverts on London buses had wanted it to go to cancer care or research, that’s where they’d have given it. Ian ### By: admin - Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/2008/10/22/atheist-bus-campaign-enjoys-record-day-justgiving/#comment-3336 - Published: 2008-10-24T20:06:43+01:00 Yes, that’s true in that everyone gave knowing exactly what they were giving to. But I think a number of them were moved by the quirkiness and newsworthiness of the campaign. Actually I wonder if everyone, in particular the later donors, did know exactly what they were giving to. The cause I imagine, rather than the poster fund, which had evidently been met. I don’t think the BHA indicated how it would spend the excess for some time after the original target had been reached: the message mentioning“ Buses, trains, billboards” on their Justgiving page didn’t appear until yesterday or today I believe. An earlier message mentioned getting “adverts inside the same buses to strengthen the campaign’s impact”, but can one really spend £90,000 inside the 30 buses that the original campaign was going to run on? ### By: admin - Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/2008/10/22/atheist-bus-campaign-enjoys-record-day-justgiving/#comment-3337 - Published: 2008-10-28T16:12:00+00:00 Online fundraising company AltaContact suggest on their blog that the final total could have been even higher: [http://www.altacontact.co.uk/myblog/Should-the-headline-in-Fundraising.co.uk-of-24th-October-read-Atheist-bus-campaign-hits-100-000-less-Justgiving-commissions-79.html](http://www.altacontact.co.uk/myblog/Should-the-headline-in-Fundraising.co.uk-of-24th-October-read-Atheist-bus-campaign-hits-100-000-less-Justgiving-commissions-79.html) They point out that their online donation system could have saved the British Humanist Association significant sums on the £100,000 plus Gift Aid that they raised by Justgiving. ### By: admin - Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/2008/10/22/atheist-bus-campaign-enjoys-record-day-justgiving/#comment-3338 - Published: 2008-12-05T16:55:04+00:00 Justgiving have, as they promised, shared some of the online fundraising lessons they learned from their experience of hosting the Atheist Bus campaign. In [Online fundraising lessons to be learnt from the Atheist Bus campaign](http://justgiving.wordpress.com/2008/11/24/online-fundraising-lessons-to-be-learnt-from-the-atheist-bus-campaign/), they cover the scale of the awareness raising, donors’ countries, and websites that drove the most traffic. In particular, they noticed that visitors spent a long time (three minutes on average) reading the comments of previous donors. “So if you’re running an appeal”, they advise, “one way of increasing engagement is to allow people to have their say by commenting – clearly people donating to this appeal wanted to know what others had written. Having said that, you do need to have a clear policy on what kind of message content is acceptable”. ### By: admin - Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/2008/10/22/atheist-bus-campaign-enjoys-record-day-justgiving/#comment-3339 - Published: 2009-01-06T14:52:00+00:00 Following the success of the British Humanist Association’s fundraising appeal, the first buses with the campaign’s posters took to the streets today. In all, 800 buses featuring the slogan “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life” will run in cities across England, Scotland and Wales, along with 1000 adverts on the London underground and two large LCD screens on Oxford Street.  ⌊Atheist bus campaign begins - photo: copyright 2009 - Jon Worth / British Humanist Association⌉ Photo: copyright 2009 – Jon Worth / [British Humanist Association](http://www.atheistbus.org.uk) ### By: admin - Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/2008/10/22/atheist-bus-campaign-enjoys-record-day-justgiving/#comment-3340 - Published: 2009-02-11T12:53:41+00:00 Just a week or so after I’d raised the possibility of an atheist bus slogan generator, I now find one. [http://www.ruletheweb.co.uk/b3ta/bus/](http://www.ruletheweb.co.uk/b3ta/bus/) It uses, with permission, one of the more famous photos of the atheist bus campaign posters from [Jon Worth at atheistbus.org.uk](http://atheistbus.org.uk/). Now you can type in your own message, controversial or not. Here’s one I made earlier, which no doubt the [PFRA](http://www.pfra.org.uk) will like. I decided to keep the style of the original – strapline, “now stop complaining”, and URL. [⌊Bus Slogan Generator - make your own controversial statement!⌉⌊Bus Slogan Generator- make your own controversial statement!⌉[ ### By: admin - Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/2008/10/22/atheist-bus-campaign-enjoys-record-day-justgiving/#comment-3341 - Published: 2009-10-06T21:54:46+01:00 You’ve seen the bus poster, now buy the Christmas book. “The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas”, edited by Ariane Sherine, creator of the Atheist Bus Campaign, has been published. According to Amazon.co.uk, in it “42 atheist celebrities, comedians, scientists and writers give their funny and serious tips for enjoying the Christmas season.” This initiative too has a fundraising element. The full book advance fee and all royalties will go to the HIV charity Terrence Higgins Trust. [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Atheists-Guide-Christmas-Ariane-Sherine/dp/0007322615/219](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Atheists-Guide-Christmas-Ariane-Sherine/dp/0007322615/219)