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Chariot sells Monday to interactive TV game company

Fundraising | Gemma Ware | 4 Apr 2008

Charity lottery Monday was saved from closure on 18 January after interactive television gaming company Netplay TV bought it from operators Chariot.

Netplay TV, which runs an interactive "live Roulette" show on Sky Channel 847, bought Monday's intellectual property rights and its database of 280,000 lottery players from Chariot for £140,500. Chariot will continue to operate the game during a transition period of four weeks at an estimated cost of £40,500, which is to be taken out of the purchase price. News of the buyout came just two days after Chariot had announced it could no longer continue to fund the struggling lottery.

Netplay TV said it intended to create an interactive TV lottery game show based around the Monday brand, which it anticipates will be on air by mid-February on either a Freeview or satellite channel. Martin Higginson, the company's chairman and chief executive, said: "Our aim is to inject more life, more vibrancy into the whole thing, in order to make it a fun, interactive, charity lottery show." He added that the company is still in the process of finalising the show's format, but that the draw would now be made on live television. Players would still enter the lottery online.

Despite raising more than £1.65m for its 70 charity partners since it launched last May, Monday's ticket sales never got off the ground. It required sales of £2m a week in order to break even, yet even in its first week the lottery sold only £500,000 worth of tickets. In July, Chariot asked its charity partners to help fund a renewed marketing campaign for Monday called a "rebateable commission" asking them to contribute an extra 6p out of every £1 ticket to try and reinvigorate sales. The intention was that this extra money would be paid back to the charities once ticket sales improved. However, Chariot still failed to make a profit and as a consequence the charities will not get the money returned.

Matthew Waterman, Chariot's finance director, chief operating officer and company secretary, said there was "deep disappointment" in the company that the scheme had failed. "All of the charities involved in Monday were perfectly aware of the direction in which sales were going. They knew that unless we did something either this week or next week to improve things, then the lottery scheme would have to have been stopped," he said.

David Burland, chief operating officer of Help the Hospices, which has received around £30,000 from Monday, cautiously welcomed news of the buyout but said that its continued participation in the lottery would depend on Netplay TV's proposal for the game. "If the new owners create an attractive concept, I hope we'll benefit from it, but we will have to wait and see the detail they come up with," he said.

In a statement Chariot said its board would seek to find a business to reverse into after selling Monday, but that it would not necessarily be a lottery operation. 

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