The Beginnings

The Big Give was founded by Sir Alec Reed in 2007 who remains very involved in the organisation to this day. Initially, the vision behind the Big Give website was to provide a search engine for charities and a secure way for individuals to give online.

Match funding was born

In 2008, we ran our first ever Christmas Challenge, which doubled £1 million worth of donations. The campaign was so successful that the match funding ran out within 45 minutes. The Christmas Challenge grew from there and is now the UK’s biggest online match funding campaign. We have run annual Christmas Challenges ever since.

In 2009 we launched our first Emergency match funding appeal following a spate of disasters in Asia Pacific. The Big Give has continued to run Emergency appeals; the trigger point usually coincides with the Disasters & Emergencies Committee launching an appeal.

The Big Give expands its services

In 2010, the Big Give launched the Philanthropy in Schools Programme which teaches students about philanthropy and charitable giving, using the Big Give platform as a way to discover and select charities. The programme closed in 2018 after schools had collectively raised over £50,000 for more than 900 charities.

The Big Give also launched several other services for charities including an advice column in 2012 and trustee finder service in 2013. In the same year, we also launched the individual donor account function giving individuals a snapshot of their giving history.