What a year it’s been for us here at Big Give HQ! At a time when so many across our country and the world are struggling, the generosity of our Champions, the public and the hard work and impact of our charity partners has never been more needed.
This year has, once again, demonstrated the power of match funding campaigns; more people give, and people give more when their donations are matched. We have raised over £42.8m, taking the total raised in the lifetime of Big Give to £233m. We celebrated our 15th birthday this year, and our board and team agreed to a new strategy to raise £1bn by 2030. We are almost a quarter of the way there, but there is still a long way to go!
One of my favourite projects this year has been working on our new brand. We launched it a few months ago and had it live on our new website in time for our biggest campaign, the Christmas Challenge. At the heart of our new brand was the idea of a ‘Generosity Multiplier’. We took time to articulate our values which I think perfectly sums up what we’re about:
We are Generous
We are Purposeful
We are Trustworthy
We are Together
It is a source of enormous pride to work for an organisation that puts those values at the heart of everything we do (and, if you’re interested, you can see some of the implementation of our new brand in this short explainer video about what Big Give does).
As part of the rebrand, we also redefined our purpose statement: “To multiply the impact of generous giving and tackle the world’s big challenges”. And, my goodness, 2022 has certainly been a year of big challenges. We’ve seen the biggest conflict on the European continent since WW2, the cost of living crisis, political turmoil, further evidence of the climate emergency such as record temperatures in the UK and floods in Pakistan, and the death of our monarch, to name but a few things.
I’m so proud that Big Give has been able to respond to some of these challenges. This year, we:
- Ran our biggest ever Christmas Challenge, which raised a whopping £28.6m, almost a 20% increase on last year.
- Launched emergency campaigns to respond to the international situation in Ukraine and Pakistan, raising £3.9m and £1.2m, respectively and the cost of living crisis here in the UK in partnership with Experian, which raised £212k.
- Launched our first ever women and girls match funding campaign (thanks to funding from DCMS), which raised £2m, and piloted a mental health campaign on World Mental Health Day, which raised £316k
- Continued to grow existing campaigns like the Green Match Fund and the Childhood Trust’s Champions for Children campaign, raising £2.7m and £3m. The number of charities raising money through their own match funding campaigns on the Big Give platform continues to grow.
- Significantly, Big Give has also started to invest in match funding ourselves through our Anchor Match Fund, which we hope to continue to scale in future years.
Among all the campaigns we’ve run, we were delighted to implement our new website with our fresh new brand. We’ve also introduced new features to make the whole performance of the platform more stable, secure and, crucially, frictionless for all of our customers. This has included allowing donors to save card details to ease repeat donations, launching a beta version of a donation credit scheme (which we will roll out further in 2023) and working with JP Morgan’s Force For Good programme on a new customer service facility which will go live in 2023.
None of this would be possible without our incredible Big Give team, board of trustees and volunteer ambassadors. They really are an incredibly hard-working and talented bunch and I, as MD, owe each and every one of them a debt of gratitude. We’ve said goodbye to some of our colleagues this year but have welcomed new talent and experience into the Big Give team.
After a well-earned rest, we are focused and excited to take whatever 2023 has to throw at us and continue on our journey to match donations and multiply impact here, at home, and further afield.
Thanks for being part of the journey.
Alex