News

eBay Small Charity Week competition winners announced

Fundraising | Jonathan Last | 11 Jun 2012

The four winners of the Small Charity Week Give at Checkout Challenge 2012, in which charities entice eBay shoppers to donate to their cause, have been revealed.

The Foundation for Social Improvement (FSI), the organiser of Small Charity Week, invited not-for-profit organisations to submit a tagline of up to 90 characters that contained the phrase “I want to”. 

eBay customers will be greeted by a total of five messages when they pay for their goods during Small Charity Week – which starts today and ends this Friday, 15 June – giving them the opportunity to donate to one of the causes. Four of the slogans come from the competition winners and a fifth is from FSI itself, which reads “I want to build a world where small charities everywhere have the support they need to survive.”

Horse Rangers, which develops children and young people by teaching them to ride and look after horses, is the first of the successful entrants, with “I want to give a child with special needs a chance to ride a horse.”

The Oliver Fisher Special Care Baby Trust provides vital equipment and otherwise supports small and sick infants. Its tagline is “I want to help buy an incubator to allow a premature baby to live.”

“I want to buy a radio for a lonely, isolated, housebound elderly person in the UK” is the winning entry by WaveLength, a charity that looks to combat the root causes of loneliness and isolation through the provision of radios and televisions.

Finally, Za Foundation, which supports the needs of children and young people in the rural communities of South Africa’s Nkomazi region, won with “I want to buy a South African orphan a uniform so that they are allowed to go to school.”

eBay fundraising push

Small Charity Week and eBay have collaborated since their first event in 2010, when over £19,000 was raised for small charities. It was revealed earlier this year that charity sales on eBay doubled in 2011, the £6.25m its representing  a year-on-year increase of 56 per cent.

Pauline Broomhead, chief executive of the FSI, said that this year saw more entries than ever.

Lorin May, head of EU charity & sustainability at eBay, added: “We’re delighted that over 1.7 million people have given to charity when making a purchase on eBay, raising almost £6m to date.

“The wide range of fundraising messages from small charities showed great creativity and imagination, and we hope the winners will inspire ever more eBay users to support good causes.”