The Big Give 2009 Christmas Challenge raises £3 million in two hours
Howard Lake | 18 December 2009 | News
Major donor giving site The Big Give raised £7.7 million last week during its Christmas 2009 matched giving campaign. The first £3 million of this was raised in just two hours.
The Big Give raised this total by creating a matched fund: over 175 participating charities then persuaded their donors to give during the week of 7-11 December on the grounds that their donations would be doubled with matched funding from the Reed Foundation.
Participating charities included the Princes Trust, WWF and the National Trust.
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The online donations and their tax-efficient elements were again handled by Liverpool-based Charities Trust, which has been working with The Big Give for the past three years. During the week of the campaign it handled more than 7,000 pledges.
Jason Doherty, Head of Marketing at Charities Trust, congratulated the Big Give on beating its original target of £6 million.
He explained: “Our website is the payment conduit that sits behind The Big Give. Managing donations from £5 to £50,000 that then need to be collated and transferred to up to 6,000 charities requires an effective system that we supply. We work with Leeds-based, full service digital agency Chapter Eight to supply a secure, safe and easy to use payment gateway which is fully integrated with our website and that allows every donation to be tracked, monitored and transferred to the correct charity”.
Alec Reed, founder of The Big Give, added: “In our first two years, The Big Give has raised millions for charity, matched several wealthy donors with new charities, and inspired a new generation of philanthropists.”
The Reed Foundation claims that this is “the largest match donation programme that UK charities have ever experienced”.
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.