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.

Byte Night... Will you sleep out for Charity?

Slightly off topic today, but all for a good cause. WIN plc are supporting Byte Night 2010 and I need your help.

Byte Night is the Technology industry’s annual sleep out in support of Action for Children. Each year hundreds of individuals and teams from across the Technology and business community spend a night exposed to the elements in a bid to raise sponsorship and awareness of Action for Children’s work.

It all began 12 years ago when 30 individuals from the Technology industry slept out and raised £35,000. Since then the event has grown to over 700 sleepers raising almost £550,000 in 2009 alone. Patrons, sponsors and sleepers include celebrities and leading figures, CIOs, systems developers, business managers, marketers and more.

So what are WIN doing? Well Graham Rivers and myself are forming a team - and we need three volunteers to join us. We are ideally looking for three WINners from different departments within WIN so that we can have some competition between departments on our fundraising goal - to raise over £3000.

Interested? Well here are a few more details; the event takes place on 8 Oct at Thames Valley Park, and the Team will sleep out from 11pm until 6am along with hundreds of other people. If you would like to get involved email me or pop over for a chat.

Once we have the Team together we will let everyone know how they can help support the WIN team in our fund raising efforts.