Children In Need 2010 - £500k+ by text!

Charlie and Paul and some of the
Children in Need Team at BT Tower

Well this blog is one year old, and this is my last post as an IMI/WIN team member, but a great one to end on.

As many of you would have been aware we were assisting Children in Need with text donations this year. Charlie and I were in the BT Tower on Friday evening till the show finished at 2am, supporting the Children in Need team with live updates on the donations. On Friday the text to donate service was mainly used to support the outside broadcast events, with promotion on large screens at the venues - we got a steady flow of donations amounting to around £90,000 during the evening. 

Saturday afternoon at 5:30 the BBC showed a highlights show of the best bits from Children In Need (available on iPlayer, here, for next week or so). As all the call centres were now closed this show just featured text donations. There was a promo (top left) through out the show, plus calls to action by JLS. This show saw a massive spike in donations, with the platform handling 1000+ donations a minute at peak. The total raised shot up to over £450,000 and adding in the money raised during the One Show in the run up IMI/WIN will have assisted in collecting over £500,000. Which I think is a pretty fantastic total that everyone at IMI/WIN should be very proud of, thanks to the many people that helped support the event.

Text for Heroes this weekend

This weekend WIN plc are providing the text donation route for the Help for Heroes Concert at Twickenham Stadium. This looks like a fantastic event, headlined by Robbie Williams and featuring acts such as Tom Jones, Alexandra Burke, The Saturdays and a host of others all in support of the Help for Heroes charity.

To make a £5 donation visitors simply text HERO to 70100, WIN have managed to secure 100% outpayments for the event from all our operator partners. The details for text donation are also appearing in the event press adverts and web site.

If you want to watch the concert there are still a few tickets available, or you can always enjoy it on the BBC on Sunday night from 8pm - and don't forget to tell your friends to make a donation too.

Well done to everyone involved with getting this up and running in a very short time.

BBC Wildlife Fund

On June 20 the BBC Wild campaign that started in mid May came to a conclusion with a "Wild Night In". BBC Wild Campaign is a fundraising season along the lines of BBC Children in Need and Comic Relief aimed at supporting Wildlife charities.

Wild Night In promoted the keyword WILD on shortcode 70700 on the Sunday show and a mid week repeat. Also had the text number on the website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/wild/donate/)  and got over 15,000 donations and collected over £75,000.


They raised over a million in total but mobile was a late addition and not heavily pushed, hopefully we can do more similar projects with BBC charities in the future.

BBC News Alerts

As you are aware SMS alerts are a core part of WIN's offering. We supply text and MMS alert services to the likes of Vodafone, T-mobile and the BBC in the UK and can offer the service in all other territories.

A great example of these services is the BBC News alerts that deliver the flagship news service direct to your mobile. The BBC service only delivers significant news stories, so you never miss an important story, but you are not constantly being messaged about who has dumped who.

So give it a go, messages are charged at only 10/12p per sms received depending on network, and like all subscription services simply text STOP to the shortcode to end the service, so in this case send STOP to 82002.

To join send ALERTS START to 82002, on sign-up you get a confirmation sms with the price and stop instructions (as required by Phone Pay Plus the UK regulator of premium rate service, but more about them another time).

Enjoy.

Radio 2 Foodie Club

No excuses this week, as this one is simple and free, and best of all its run by WIN. If your not in the UK try signing up on a test SIM in the office.

As you are probably aware we run a number of services for the BBC, including text in services for radio stations. We also run SMS News alerts, and text clubs and its a text club that you can try this week.

The Radio 2 Chris Evans foodie club is extremely popular. To join simply text Food to 88291 and receive a weekly link to the Radio 2 mobile site with a creative recipe. That's it! So give it a go.



If you want to end the service simpy text STOP to 88291.