Charity Fundraising

We were delighted to have the opportunity to mark International Women’s Day 2023 in a practical way by running a challenge to help Scottish charity, Aid for Education, raise money for its microfinance project in Rwanda.

Using our One Big Challenge option coupled with a bespoke route complete with milestones which told the story of the Aid for Education’s inspirational work in Eastern Rwanda, the challenge participants raised £1,570 as they walked over 7,900 miles from Greenock, where the charity is based, to the heart of Africa.

The money raised will enable Aid for Education to help 15 women set up their own business which will provide each of them with the opportunity to earn money to pay for food, education and healthcare and give their children the chance of a more positive future.

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Walking Fundraiser

We've had a lot of charities using Big Team Challenge over the last 12 months and we've seen some incredible results.
The flexibility of Big Team Challenge's walking platform allows charities and fundraising groups to alter their approach to donations.

For the majority of our challenges, our customers use one of the following two options and have a lot of success in engaging with their audiences.

• Paid Access - You set an amount, such as £50 per team of 5, to gain access to the system. Once a user has paid for these via Just Giving or something similar, and given you the 5 emails of the users they want to add, you can then use your Big Team Challenge admin area to create their team and allocate those email addresses to that team. The system will then send out an invite to those emails and allow them to automatically get signed up and active. Some organisers also ask participants to set up their own fundraisers on top of this and donate what they make to the main campaign too.

• Open Challenge - You open up the challenge to anyone that wants to join and allow them to get registered and into teams themselves using our system. You can then use the landing page and our inter-system communication to send out regular emails and reminders urging people to set up their own fundraisers and donate to you at the end of the challenge. This option obviously requires a some goodwill from your participants not to simply use the system and not contribute, but from our experience this has not been an issue for our organisers.

Promotional / fundraising page

A new feature we are able to offer allows you to have your own public facing promotional page on our site. An example of this can be found at https://www.bigteamchallenge.com/step-challenge/demo-challenge and shows how you can talk about the challenge, show your teams progress and advertise your charity of choice at the bottom.

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Read some of our charity reviews

Learn how Aid For Education got on with their first ever Big Team Challenge.

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If you would like to learn more about our walking challenges please visit our information page or check our our pricing.

Adapting To The Community's Needs

Lockdown caused life to change is many ways and for members of Orchardhill Parish Church in Glasgow, Scotland, it meant an end to in-person gatherings. The regular services and the extra curricular social events which are important to so many parishioners were cancelled, leaving church members looking for novel ways of staying connected. The idea of a virtual pilgrimage was raised, and Big Team Challenge was chosen as the platform to help almost one-hundred churchgoers walk the 7,300 kms (4,536 miles) from Glasgow to Jerusalem.

Regular Updates

While on their journey, the church’s minister, Grant Barclay, gave a pilgrimage update on his weekly video sermon, adding his own personal thoughts and stories about the latest milestone the group had reached that week. The challenge organisers, Maureen and Richard Park, used the platform’s messaging tools to send out daily updates and weekly challenges, keeping everyone entertained and motivated throughout the four week journey.

Digital Fundraising

The challenge was also used as fundraiser, with donations being accepted from participants and their friends and family and put towards the various charities the church supports.

18 million steps counted

The church ran their challenge using our “One Big Challenge” mode, where all participants combine their steps towards a single route. This allowed the group to cover the huge distance surprisingly quickly, almost adding enough distance to walk there and back again. In the end, church members clocked up over 18 million steps during the six-week challenge.

Read about our other customer success stories here