Over £10.6m raised for Comic Relief via SMS donations
We’re excited to announce that this year’s Red Nose Day campaign raised more than £10.6m via text-to-donate. Red Nose Day is Comic Relief’s biennial BBC campaign, which raises money to help people in the UK and across the world to live happier, healthier and safer lives.
This year the live show was aired on Friday 15th March, and there were also a series of driver programmes. All of the shows promoted text-to-donate, allowing donors to donate via text at a range of price points: £5, £10, £20 and, for the first time for Comic Relief, £30 amounts for both the live show and the Kilimanjaro challenge. Those donating had the costs charged to their mobile phone bills, making payments as quick and simple as possible.
During the live show and the Kilimanjaro climb, the money raised by the £30 price point alone accounted for over 30% of the total raised via SMS, proving that the public are keen to give more to charity in this way.
This year, we also worked with Comic Relief to introduce a competition which allowed viewers to donate or to opt-out of a donation whilst entering the competition. This was featured on BBC’s Saturday Kitchen and was the first time that the charity launched a competition to drive donations.
Those getting involved paid £5 to be in with a chance of winning an exciting dining experience, cooked for them by celebrity chefs. Using Fonix’s delayed donation technology, entrants had the choice to opt-out without being charged within 60 minutes of entering.
We’ve come so far in the past 5 years that we’ve worked with the charity, as we now provide a total of four price points and we’re also constantly innovating to allow the charity to roll out exciting new features. We can’t wait to see what happens next!