Helping Comic Relief smash its fundraising targets

We developed a bespoke fundraising platform, helping Comic Relief boost fundraising by 20%:

  • £67.9 million raised
  • 1 million users registered
  • 3,600 concurrent users per second
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The challenge

Comic Relief raises money for those living tough lives across the UK and Africa through two iconic events: Sport Relief and Red Nose Day, which has become something of a British institution.

The charity has always sought to use technology for the effective delivery of its operations. But unlike charities with ongoing fundraising and donation drives, Comic Relief’s digital platforms need to support dramatic spikes in traffic when thousands of people access its channels during the same timeframe.

With Sport Relief looming large, the charity urgently needed a secure, robust, and high-performance web platform that could support a high volume of traffic and help the organisation to achieve a record-number of participants.

The platform needed to be engaging and easy to use, and needed to support all online registration, event management, and fundraising activities. Providing a smooth user journey for participants and donors would be key to adoption.

What we did

Comic Relief chose Inviqa as its technical partner for the project thanks to our experience in building bespoke digital products that address complex business and user needs.

Rising to the challenge, our team built Fundraising Operating System Two (or ‘FROST’ as it became known) – a robust but flexible platform to support all aspects of Comic Relief's online campaign and fundraising activities.

FROST allowed fundraisers to easily secure sponsorship donations for their own work or school-related fundraising events. Participants were able to search for events close to their postcode, and set up a self-service profile to invite friends, family, and colleagues to join them. Profile pages were interactive and engaging, and the platform blended seamlessly into social media channels to build an online buzz around the campaign using Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

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The results

The fundraising and registration system FROST comfortably met all key performance indicators, enabling Comic Relief to smash fundraising records for Sport Relief:

  • More than 1 million people register to take part in Sport Relief
  • £67.9 million raised – a 53% boost on the previous campaign
  • 20% increase in public fundraising
  • FROST platform able to handle 3,600 concurrent users per second
  • 226,000 participants use platform to register for Sport Relief events
  • Supports launch of 151,000 fundraising and sponsorship pages
  • Manages the fundraising operations behind major celebrity fundraising events

Building on the success of Sport Relief, the FROST fundraising and registration system delivered well for Red Nose Day and went on to support subsequent Sport Relief events.

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