Essex County Council creates The Essex Lottery for local good causes
Howard Lake | 28 September 2017 | News
Essex County Council has established a weekly lottery to help raise funds for community projects throughout the county. The Essex Lottery, expected to be “the largest County Council run lottery in the UK”, will launch in October.
Tickets for the weekly lottery will cost £1. From each ticket sold, 60p will be donated to good causes – “more than double the National Lottery” according to the Council. Of this 50p goes straight to the player’s chosen charity (from those registered on The Essex Lottery website) and 10p will be donated to a central fund, which will be allocated to good causes as grants.
Prizes will be made up from 20p per ticket, and the remaining 20p will fund the administration of the lottery and VAT.
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Which organisations can benefit from the Essex Lottery?
To be eligible for funding from The Essex Lottery good causes need to be based in Essex and provide a service which directly benefits Essex residents.
Registering an organisation on the site is free and straightforward, with no administration charge.
Participating organisations will be featured on the lottery website, and receive personalised marketing materials, email and telephone support, all all free of charge.
The first charity to register is Support 4 Sight, which runs services for over 4,000 blind and partially sighted children and adults across Essex to help them be active and manage their daily needs.
They are now one of over twenty local charities and community projects across Essex which have registered with The Essex Lottery ahead of its launch.
Gary Hyams, Chief Executive, Support 4 Sight, said: “We were delighted to hear about the new Essex Lottery and to register as one of the good causes people can support when they buy their lottery tickets. We provide emotional support, equipment, training and regular social meet ups for people living with sight loss and their families and the additional funds we raise through the Essex Lottery will enable us to deliver more support.”
Gatherwell
The Essex Lottery is being run for Essex County Council by Gatherwell, a registered External Lottery Manager (ELM).
Established in 2013, it runs lotteries for national charities including Age UK and Parkinson’s UK. In 2015, it became the UK’s first online local authority lottery provider, partnering with Aylesbury Vale District Council.
It runs Your School Lottery.
How to play
The £1 tickets for each weekly draw can be purchased online or by telephone. Players will also have the option of setting up a direct debit for regular participation.
The weekly draw will take place every Saturday when a six-digit winning combination will be generated.
The jackpot draw process is based upon the results of the Super66 game run by Lotterywest, which is part of the Government of Western Australia.
Draw results will be published on the website as well as on Facebook and Twitter. Winners will be notified via email or phone within two weeks of the lottery being drawn.
Prizes
There is a jackpot prize of £25,000. To win that you will need to match all six numbers in the same order. This prize is guaranteed and is not dependent on how many tickets are sold.
There is also a guaranteed prize raffle draw each week. Each ticket is unique and “has an equal chance of winning, irrespective of the game numbers chosen”. The winning ticket will be selected at random using the online resource random.org.
“Raising money within the community, for the community”
Councillor David Finch, Leader of Essex County Council, said that The Essex Lottery would “support community projects up and down the county, on the principle of raising money within the community for the community.
“In a time of reduced funding and increased community need, we want to empower local charities and good causes to raise money in an easy and effective way while helping people to support the causes they care most about.”
- North East Essex Hyperlocal Fund offers £370,000 to improve health and wellbeing (2 September 2021)
- Essex Community Foundation to hold phone-in funding surgery (17 March 2017)
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.