British Gas Twitter campaign raises £100,000 for Shelter

Howard Lake | 8 December 2016 | News

• Tagged with:
• christmas
• corporate
• hashtag
• Twitter

British Gas has reprised its Christmas Twitter campaign on behalf of Shelter, donating £100,000 to the homeless charity in response to 100,000 shares of its hashtag on Twitter.

The original target was £25,000. To unlock a £1 donation from the energy provider you simply had to tweet #TweetForShelter. British Gas employees introduced the campaign on a video.

British Gas sensibly published terms and conditions for this campaign. Other hashtag-to-donate campaigns have proved wildly popular with the corporate donor ending up having to donate more than was planned. Some terms and conditions can help limit the chances of that.

For example, British Gas stipulated that it was only open to Great Britain residents aged 18 or over. In addition it stated that the campaign would run from 9am (UK time) on Monday 28th November 2016 until 11.59pm (UK time) on Sunday 4th December 2016 .

This year the campaign did remarkably well, with over 100,000 tweets of the hashtag. Consequently the company decided to quadruple the size of its original donation to £100,000 at the end of the one week campaign.

Not surprisingly Shelter’s staff were delighted:

Fundraising consultant John Thompson (originator of the FiverGiver campaign idea) wondered publicly whether, based on last year’s campaign result, British Gas might just be persuaded to double its donation to £200,000, given the number of people who were continuing to retweet the hashtag after the £100,000 level had been reached.

Last year’s campaign

In November 2015 British Gas ran the campaign for the first time, aiming to raise £10,000 for Shelter in the same way. In the end, 16,564 people took part so British Gas rounded that up and donated £20,000.
 

• Five tweets for fundraisers on 12 July 2017 (12 July 2017)
• Twitter donation tool for those rage fundraising moments (3 March 2017)
• Twitter users donated £2.5m via JustGiving in 2013

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.