The Big Give’s Christmas Challenge has signed up a host of new funding champions, including the National Lottery Heritage Fund, with supporters able to donate by Apple Pay for the first time as it sets a £14m target for the week-long initiative.
This year’s campaign launches at midday on Giving Tuesday (December 3) and runs for seven days. Throughout the week, participating charities will see supporters’ donations matched (up to a value of £25,000 per organisation), doubling the value of their gifts.
Last year, the campaign saw 589 charities take part, from small local organisations to large international charities. Donations totalled £6,195,035 with £5,644,520 match funds, plus a further £1,485,388 in Gift Aid, breaking records to raise over £13m overall.
The large majority of participating charities in 2018 said that the Christmas Challenge attracted new donors (94%), boosted their confidence in online fundraising (89%) and that current supporters gave more than they usually would (63%).
The campaign’s payments processing partner CharityCheckout is introducing Apple Pay to the giving platform to enhance the campaign’s appeal to the growing proportion of givers that like to pay from their mobile.
Jonathan Frank, director of The Big Give, said: “We are all aware of how our lives are adapting around mobile technology, more so than ever with mobile payments and we want to embrace this for our charities donors. Introducing Apple Pay through CharityCheckout will be a real boost for the charities we work with: it’s technology that reduces the friction of the giving process, making it easier than ever for people to support the causes they are passionate about.”
The Big Give expects the Christmas Challenge 2019 to be even bigger with more match funding secured than ever before. There are now over 20 funding champions, including Reed Foundation, The Childhood Trust and Four Acre Trust, as well as the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
National Lottery Heritage Fund director of strategy and innovation Anne Young said: “This is the first year we’ve signed up as a partner, following a match-funding pilot we ran that shows there are not just financial benefits to this approach, but also great opportunities for the organisations taking part to form valuable partnerships, gain new supporters and volunteers, and expand their audiences.
“When we launched our new five-year strategic plan at the beginning of this year we made a firm commitment to offering match-funding, to incentivise others to donate to heritage, and it’s great to be putting this into practice.”
