The Big Give raises £2 million in 45 minutes
Howard Lake | 2 December 2008 | News
Philanthropy website The Big Give this week raised £2 million in under an hour in a matched giving campaign. This represented an average of £44,000 a minute.
The surge of online donations came in response to the pledge by Alec Reed CBE, founder of Reed Recruitment Group and of theBigGive, to match donations of up to £5,000 (per donor, per charity) from his Reed Foundation up to a maximum of £1 million.
Clearly a number of charities had encouraged their supporters to take advantage of this offer as £600,000 was donated within 18 minutes of the matched giving service going live. The volume of activity surprised The Big Give and the site crashed.
The £1 million total was reached after the scheme went live for a further 27 minutes today with an average donation of over £1,400. The total was reached with just 681 donations.
Jon Brooks, Managing Director of The Big Give, said: “We thought the £1 million would be matched within a couple of weeks. To have all of it donated in minutes is incredible”.
The Reed Foundation matched funding scheme was the first of its kind to take place on The Big Give, although Alec Reed gave £250,000 in vouchers to 10,000 top UK businesses to give to charities on the site during September.
Brooks and The Big Give team hope that the matched giving scheme will encourage individuals, companies, trusts and foundations to start their own matched funding schemes for their favourite charities on the site.
www.thebiggive.org.uk
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.