Friends Reunited launches not-for-profit online lottery for charities
Howard Lake | 2 January 2004 | News
Friends Reunited has launched a not-for-profit lottery which will donate 45p of the £1 tickets to a range of 15 charities, with more organisations to be added later.
Happy Group, the company that runs the Friends Reunited Web site, says that the first draw will take place towards the end of January 2004 and will thereafter be held weekly on Tuesdays at 5pm.
Founders Steve and Julie Pankhurst say that the online lottery is their response to the many requests for charitable help that they now receive. “The Friends Reunited Lottery seemed like a great way of helping and, most importantly, providing an alternative to the profit orientated approach of other lotteries,” they said. With 10 million registered users, the site certainly has great potential to promote its lottery widely.
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Each draw costs £1, and players need to choose five numbers from one to 34. Friends Reunited say that they will take just 5% for administrative purposes.
The beneficiary charities are Anthony Nolan Trust, Barnardo’s, British Heart Foundation, British Red Cross, Cancer Research, Help the Aged, Macmillan Cancer Relief, Mencap, National Missing Persons Helpline, National Trust, NSPCC, Oxfam, RNIB, RNLI and RSPCA. These charities were chosen by the team at Friends Reunited who tried to cover a range of charitable causes. Other charities, however, could be added to the list in the future: the Pankhursts say that “members will also be able to suggest charities and we will be adding as many of these as we can in the future.”
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.