The chief operating officer at Britain’s Personal Best, the £1m Olympic legacy project that will culminate in a national mass participation weekend in early October, is confident that it will meet its first-year participation targets of 6,500 charities and community groups and 125,000 individuals.

Britain’s Personal Best (BPB) is a year-round programme that aims to inspire people to set themselves goals and potentially attract sponsorship to achieve those goals, raising money for their chosen charity. It launches publicly today and aims to be the biggest fundraising event in the UK by 2018, in league with the likes of Comic Relief, and to have reached all corners of the globe by 2020.

Charities can also take part by leading group challenges – for instance, Mencap has agreed to promote its free Spellathon competition through BPB.

BPB’s organisers, Society Network Foundation (SNF), won £1m from the Big Lottery Fund to deliver the project this year after being invited to apply for the grant.  The solicited bid has been criticised by shadow minister for civil society, Gareth Thomas MP, who accused BIG of being too close to ministers and of giving the grant to SNF because of its Conservative Party links, despite it appearing to have a “track record of failure”.  

The award was announced in May and because of the short timetable between then and October, SNF has agreed with BIG a 100-day plan which is kept under constant review.

The project will launch this evening at Channel 4’s headquarters in central London.

Website development

On SNF’s application form to BIG, it allocated a budget of £78,000 for the website and said it would take a “mobile-first” approach to digital development.

It also targeted to announce three media partners by May 2013, and said it was in talks with Google, YouTube, Twitter and a major broadcaster.  It aimed to have a million page views by October, and pledged that ten large charities, 1,500 small and medium-sized charities, plus 5,000 community groups would be signed up to play an active role in BPB by October.

As well as this, a total of 125,000 individuals would register to complete their own Personal Best.

'Targets may even be surpassed'

Sukhvinder Kaur-Stubbs, BPB’s chief operating officer, told civilsociety.co.uk that she was confident these targets would be met or even surpassed, because the project would be promoted by BPB’s various strategic and theme partners to their own members and networks. These partners include Acevo, the Institute of Fundraising, NHS Confederation, CSV, Groundwork UK, and 21st Century Legacy.

However, she said publicity this year would be focused on social media, and regional and local press, with TV coverage expected in coming years.

A few celebrities announced their own Personal Best today as part of the launch. Sky TV presenter Charlie Webster plans to raise money for Women's Aid by running further than ever before, poet Musa Okwonga plans to sing in public, and disability campaigner Martyn Sibley plans to ride his wheelchair from John O'Groat's to Land's End to raise money for Scope. 

The online form to allow people to register their Personal Best on the website, www.whatsyours.org, went live this morning, though there is no fundraising functionality available yet.

BPB’s presentation to prospective strategic partners earlier this year stated that “the website has been developed to support and optimise personal participation, group formation, interaction and increase online giving”. The online experience would be "tailored to their interests and connections found by aggregating graphs over multiple social networks".

Kaur-Stubbs said that the IT tender for the website functionality would be finalised shortly once BPB had agreed resources and priorities with its strategic partners. She hoped the site would be optimised for fundraising, including being able to collect donations and claim gift aid, but admitted that level of specification was not finalised yet. BPB is still in talks with existing donation sites, such as JustGiving and Virgin Money Giving, but if it cannot agree deals with those then it may have to work on something new itself, she said.

She also hoped there would be a mobile app but this too is yet to be decided.