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Partnerships and campaigns: January 2013

Fundraising | 8 Jan 2013

The Met Office picked WaterAid as its charity of the year, Jon Snow donned a Christmas jumper, Macmillan has already smashed its World's Biggest Coffee Morning record, and more in civilsociety.co.uk's January round-up of fundraising partnerships and campaigns.

• Event: Top chefs put on a winter banquet raising £86,000 for ChildLine. The event, held on 3 December, was organised by cooking business Great British Chefs. Adam Stokes, Robert Thompson, Adam Simmonds and Lisa Allen prepared dishes, and a live auction helped to raise the sum.
• Event: Macmillan Cancer Support won’t finalise its World’s Biggest Coffee Morning fundraising total until early this year, but by December it had already smashed its record by £3m. The 2012 event has raised more than £13m, with money still coming in. 2011’s coffee morning had been its most profitable to date – raising £10m.
• Partnership: Disney UK has donated to Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity £1 for every download of the app for its Christmas film ‘Disney Fairies: Lost & Found’. The initiative is part of a partnership between the entertainment company and GOSH, which has raised £10m since 2008.
• Campaign: Last year Save the Children launched its ‘largest ever’ Christmas campaign, and it included a new initiative – Christmas Jumper Day. Some 275,000 people had signed up by mid-November to wear a festive jumper and make a £1 donation on December 14. The initiative was supported by celebrities, corporate partners and advertising across TV, print and digital.
• Foundation: The Paul Hamlyn Foundation has celebrated its 25th anniversary by giving a £1m endowment to an Indian charity providing prosthetics. The endowment follows the UK government’s decision to halt aid to India from 2015 and is made as part of a wider strategy by the Foundation to build capacity of Indian NGOs.
• Partnership: GE Capital has announced a partnership with women’s charity Platform 51. After “close consultation” with the charity, GE Capital has agreed to make a donation of £24,000 for back-office finance and IT investment, coupled with professional advice, staff training and an assessment and upgrade of Platform 51’s IT infrastructure.
• Partnership: The Met Office has chosen WaterAid to be its charity partner until 2015. The weather bureau received over 30 applications to be considered as its corporate charity, which were whittled down to a shortlist of three. The three shortlisted charities – ShelterBox, WaterAid and Computer Aid International – were put to an online vote in which WaterAid took half of all votes cast.
• Website: Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research has launched Pledgeit, a fundraising platform which enables people to set challenges and fundraising targets for their Facebook friends. Other people can then pledge donations, but no money is taken until the challenger confirms that the task has been completed. The charity will make the platform available to other charities “in due course”.
• Partnership: Kiva has announced a partnership with TripAdvisor that will see the travel review site donate $250,000. TripAdvisor will email users who have written reviews of countries in which Kiva operates, offering to make a $25 microloan to a Kiva entrepreneur in that country on the user’s behalf. After reinvesting the repayments, TripAdvisor will donate the repayments to the microlending platform. 

Directory: Platform 51 | Macmillan | Save the Children | WaterAid