How to turn a £100k gift into a £1m donation

Howard Lake | 2 October 2014 | Blogs

How do you turn a donor’s pledge of £100,000 into one of £1 million? You hope that someone else insults them and their pledge in public.
That’s what happened yesterday. Former Conservative Party donor Arron Banks had pledged to give £100,000 to Ukip. But, without any request from the political party, he increased it tenfold after William Hague MP, leader of the House of Commons, said that he had never heard of him.
In what he described as a “fit of pique” Mr Banks, founder of the Go Skippy insurance company, decided to make a much more substantial donation to the party. “I’m hoping Mr Hague will now know who I am”, he told The Guardian.
Hague had earlier said on BBC Radio 5 Live:

“I’ve never heard of him so we are not going to get too upset about that”.

Of course, this tactic is unlikely to figure in most major gift fundraisers’ repertoire. But most will know that prestige matters to some major donors, and the size of a gift can depend on the the size of gifts given by associates or indeed rivals and competitors.
 
Photo: One million pounds by Stephen Rees on Shutterstock.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.