Comic Relief raises record £74,360,207 on Red Nose Day
Howard Lake | 19 March 2011 | News
Donations to Comic Relief’s Red Nose Day 2011 last night reached £74,360,207, the largest total reached on the night in the event’s 23 year history.
The sum for the 13th Red Nose Day includes:
* £10,030,984 raised so far by Sainsbury’s, itself the biggest single donation ever received on the night of Red Nose Day.
* £1,375,037 raised by the nine Red Nose Desert Trekkers (Ronni Ancona,Craig David, Lorraine Kelly, Scott Mills, Olly Murs, Dermot O’Leary, Nadia Sawalha, Kara Tointon and Peter White) who all completed a 108 kilometre trek across the Kaisut Desert in northern Kenya.
* £3,165,705 raised by Radio 1: £543,284 of this was raised in support of Scott Mills and the Desert Trekkers; and the remaining £2,622,421 was raised by Chris Moyles and Comedy Dave Vitty in their record breaking 52 hour marathon radio broadcast.
The Government’s Department for International Development (DFID) will match Comic Relief’s commitment to spend £10 million improving health and education across Africa, thereby boosting the value of donations to the charity.
BT handled 765,777 calls to the donation line during the live TV show. These reached a peak of 268 calls per second (16,080 calls per minute) at 21.50pm. BT coordinated around 10,000 volunteers at 129 call centres across the UK.
Comic Relief co-founder Richard Curtis said: “This is more than we ever believed we would raise. The generosity of the British public is staggering.”
Red Nose Day typically raises many millions more than the amount raised on the night. Further donations will continue to be received, and the films shown last night will start to generate income themselves as many of the sketches are available for purchase and download from iTunes.
www.rednoseday.com
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.