Battersea's 2024 Superdraw: £1.38m raised, £344,807 reached the charity

In 2024, Battersea Dogs & Cats Home raised £1,379,230 from its Superdraw, a four-times-a-year charity lottery sold at £1 a ticket. Of that figure, 25% (around £344,807) reached Battersea's charitable work. The other 75% paid for prizes, marketing, operator fees and administration.

The numbers are not in dispute. Battersea published them on its own raffle entry page, where the 2024 breakdown was disclosed before the page rolled over to its 2025 results. The figures are preserved in an archived capture of that page from 19 February 2025 (Wayback Machine snapshot web.archive.org/web/20250219174247/https://www.battersea.org.uk/support-us/other-ways-give/enter-our-raffle). The Superdraw is a Society Lottery, licensed by the Gambling Commission and run by an External Lottery Manager called Woods Valldata. The minimum charitable application allowed under UK law is 20%. Battersea is 5 percentage points above the legal floor.

Battersea has since published its 2025 Superdraw breakdown on the same page: £1,325,452 raised, 25.5% to charitable objectives, 71% to promotion and running, 3.5% to prizes. The 2025 figures sit almost exactly where the 2024 figures did, which confirms the pattern this case study describes rather than contradicting it.

What follows is an analysis of public data, not a critique. It sets out what the headline figure actually means, how Battersea's own weekly lottery product performs by comparison, where the Superdraw sits against UK sector norms, and what charity teams considering a similar product should take from it.

At a glance

• Gross raised: £1,379,230
• Charitable application: approximately £344,807 (25% of gross)
• Costs and prizes: approximately £1,034,423 (75% of gross)
• Ticket price: £1
• Top prize: £10,000 cash. Plus £1,000 second, £500 third, 20 × £25 M&S vouchers.
• Draw cadence: four Superdraws a year (Winter, Spring, Summer, Christmas)
• Mechanic: Society Lottery under the Gambling Act 2005
• Licensed operator: Woods Group Limited trading as Woods Valldata Management (Gambling Commission account 3586)
• Society lottery licensee: Battersea Dogs & Cats Home (Gambling Commission account 5084)
• Source for the 2024 figures: Battersea raffle entry page as captured on 19 February 2025, web.archive.org/web/20250219174247/https://www.battersea.org.uk/support-us/other-ways-give/enter-our-raffle (the live page has since rolled over to 2025 results)

What the Superdraw is

The Superdraw is one strand of Battersea's lottery product portfolio. The other main strand is the Paw Draw, a weekly subscription lottery with a £600 top prize and a smaller average ticket. Players who subscribe to the Paw Draw are automatically entered into all four Superdraws each year. Standalone Superdraw entries can also be bought directly.

Both products sit under Battersea's single Gambling Commission Society Lottery licence. They are run by different External Lottery Managers (Woods Valldata for the Superdraw, Starvale Management for the Paw Draw). Battersea remains the promoting society and the regulatory licensee in both cases.

The Superdraw is marketed primarily through direct mail and digital acquisition. Battersea does not publish player numbers for either product.

Where £1.38m actually went

The split, in Battersea's own published terms:

• 25% to charitable objectives. Around £344,807 of the £1.38m gross.
• 72% to promotion and running. Around £993,046. This line covers marketing, operator fees paid to Woods Valldata, fulfilment costs (ticket printing, postage, winner notification), administration, and the regulatory compliance overhead for running a licensed Society Lottery.
• 3% to prizes. Around £41,377. The £10,000 top prize, plus the smaller prizes and M&S vouchers, fall inside this figure.

The 25% to charitable objectives is, in absolute terms, around £344,807 added to Battersea's charitable expenditure budget. Battersea spent £45.33m on charitable activities in 2024 according to its filed accounts with the Charity Commission (charity number 206394). The Superdraw therefore contributed approximately 0.76% of Battersea's charitable spend that year.

For context, Battersea's total income in 2024 was £70.34m. Donations and legacies alone contributed £59.35m of that. The Superdraw's gross ticket revenue of £1.38m is roughly 2% of total income. Its charitable application is around 0.5% of total income.

How the Superdraw compares to Battersea's own Paw Draw

Battersea's most recent published Paw Draw breakdown is from 2020, on the same regulatory disclosure page:

• Paw Draw 2020 gross: £4,617,980
• Paw Draw 2020 charitable return: 89.2%
• Paw Draw 2020 charitable application: approximately £4,119,239
• Paw Draw 2020 costs: 10% to promotion and running, 0.8% to prizes

The contrast is stark. The same charity, running two licensed Society Lottery products, produces dramatically different efficiency ratios. Per pound of gross ticket revenue, the weekly Paw Draw at 89.2% returned roughly 3.6 times more charitable income than the 2024 Superdraw at 25% (89.2p versus 25p in the pound). In absolute terms, because the Paw Draw was also far larger by gross, it returned roughly twelve times more charitable income overall (around £4.12m versus £344,807).

Battersea's own 2021 Superdraw provides a like-for-like internal comparator on the same product:

• 2021 Superdraw gross: £1,354,166
• 2021 Superdraw charitable return: 57.37%
• 2021 Superdraw charitable application: approximately £776,885 (57.37% of gross)

In other words, the 2021 Superdraw returned more than double the charitable percentage of the 2024 Superdraw, on a similar gross. The drop from 57.37% to 25% across three years is not explained in any Battersea communication retrieved during research. The most plausible structural reasons are increased acquisition spend per new entrant, a higher proportion of cold-acquired players relative to retained players, and the cost base of the External Lottery Manager. The drop is large enough to be the most important fact in any honest reading of the 2024 figure.

How the Superdraw compares to other UK charity lotteries

Sector benchmarking from each organisation's own public disclosures:

Organisation	Product	Year	Gross raised	Charitable return
Battersea Dogs & Cats Home	Superdraw	2024	£1,379,230	25%
Battersea Dogs & Cats Home	Superdraw	2021	£1,354,166	57.37%
Battersea Dogs & Cats Home	Paw Draw (weekly)	2020	£4,617,980	89.2%
RSPCA	Combined lotteries, raffles, Superdraws	2024	£3,086,007	55.94%
Cancer Research UK	Weekly lottery and Superdraw	2025	£4.5m	77%
Dogs Trust	Lucky Pups Lotto	2024	£1,219,850	82%
East Anglian Air Ambulance	Lottery	2023	£6,624,938	82.68%

Gambling Commission sector data for the 2023 to 2024 reporting year reports total ticket sales of £1.1bn across large Society Lotteries and £461.5m applied to good causes. That is a sector-wide average charitable return of around 42%.

Battersea's 2024 Superdraw at 25% sits below all the named comparators and below the sector aggregate. Its 2020 Paw Draw at 89.2% sits at the top end. The same charity, two different products, two different positions on the efficiency curve.

What charity teams should take from this

Three lessons for any organisation considering a similar mechanic.

1. The headline raise figure is not the figure the charity receives. Public-facing communications often quote gross ticket revenue. The figure that funds charitable work is the application to charitable objectives, which can be anywhere from the 20% legal floor to 80% or more depending on product, scale, retention and operator. Charity boards reviewing a proposed lottery product should ask for both numbers, not just the headline.

2. Product structure does more work than brand. Battersea is one of the most recognised charity brands in the UK and has a substantial supporter base. Brand does not, on its own, produce efficient lottery economics. Battersea's own Paw Draw at 89.2% and its own Superdraw at 25% sit on the same brand. The difference is structural: a weekly subscription with retained players amortises acquisition cost across years; a quarterly raffle re-acquires entrants each round.

3. The External Lottery Manager fee structure is a large lever. When a charity outsources lottery management to a third party, the operator's fee base sits inside the "promotion and running" line. The 72% Battersea applied to promotion and running in 2024 includes the operator's share. For a smaller charity considering setting up a Society Lottery, the operator fee structure should be the first question asked of any prospective ELM, because it determines the maximum possible charitable return before any other variable.

For most small and mid-sized charities, the Society Lottery route is not commercially viable. The licence application, ongoing compliance, operator fees and acquisition infrastructure assume a player base measured in the tens of thousands. Charities with smaller supporter bases tend to do better with the standard prize draw mechanic, which has lower fixed costs and a higher proportion of revenue reaching the cause.

Society Lottery and prize draw: the legal distinction

These are two different things, and conflating them produces bad fundraising decisions.

A Society Lottery (the Battersea Superdraw):

• Requires a Gambling Commission licence
• Prize pool is funded from ticket sales
• Minimum 20% of proceeds must go to the charity
• Can sell tickets to the general public, subject to statutory per-draw and annual sales limits
• Players must be 18 or over
• Requires an annual return to the Gambling Commission

A standard charity prize draw (the mechanic used by most Crowdfunder charity draws):

• Requires no Gambling Commission licence
• Offers a free postal entry route (the defining legal feature that keeps it outside the Gambling Act licensing regime)
• Prize is typically donated by the organiser or a partner rather than funded from ticket sales (common practice, not a legal requirement)
• No mandatory minimum percentage to charity (commercially set)
• No age floor specific to the draw itself (organisers commonly set 18)
• No annual return

For a charity with a single donated prize (an experience, an artist's instrument, a holiday, a celebrity item), the prize draw route is simpler, cheaper and produces a higher proportion of revenue reaching the cause. For a charity with the volume and infrastructure to run a year-round lottery with operator support, the Society Lottery route is the established mechanic.

The two are not interchangeable, and the choice between them is one of the most consequential a charity's fundraising team can make.

What this case study doesn't claim

This case study is built on publicly disclosed Battersea data and triangulated against publicly disclosed peer data. It does not claim that Battersea has done anything wrong, that the Superdraw is mismanaged, or that the 25% return is evidence of failure. The figure is above the legal minimum and is consistent with the structural economics of a quarterly raffle with substantial acquisition spend.

What the case study does claim is that the headline figure of £1.38m, taken on its own, is misleading as a measure of what reached charitable work in 2024. The full picture is in the breakdown Battersea itself published. The 2024 breakdown was disclosed on Battersea's raffle page as that year's results stood, and is now preserved only in the archived capture cited in Sources, because the live page has since rolled over to Battersea's 2025 disclosure. The lesson for charity teams is to read the same breakdown for any lottery product before committing to a similar mechanic.

The Charity Commission accounts for year ending 31 December 2024 were filed by Battersea on 8 October 2025 and are publicly available. The Gambling Commission licence record is in the public register. None of the figures used here are proprietary or contested.

Sources

Verified 23 May 2026, re-verified 12 June 2026 (the live Battersea raffle page rolled over to 2025 figures between the two dates; the 2024 figures are sourced from the archived capture below):

• Battersea raffle entry and disclosure page: battersea.org.uk/support-us/other-ways-give/enter-our-raffle
• Battersea Paw Draw further information (historical disclosure): battersea.org.uk/support-us/paw-draw-weekly-lottery-0/paw-draw-further-information
• Battersea raffle rules (Woods Valldata hosted): battersea.raffleentry.org.uk/raffle-rules/
• Charity Commission register, Battersea full print: register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/en/sector-data/top-10-charities/-/charity-details/206394/full-print
• Gambling Commission Battersea licence record: gamblingcommission.gov.uk/public-register/business/detail/5084
• Gambling Commission industry statistics, financial year April 2023 to March 2024 (source of the £1.1bn sales and £461.5m to good causes sector aggregate): gamblingcommission.gov.uk/statistics-and-research/publication/industry-statistics-november-2024-official-statistics
• RSPCA lottery disclosure: rspca.org.uk/getinvolved/win/lottery
• Cancer Research UK Superdraw: cancerresearchuk.org/get-involved/donate/superdraw
• Dogs Trust Lucky Pups Lotto: dogstrust.org.uk/support-us/play/lottery
• East Anglian Air Ambulance lottery: eaaa.org.uk/support-us/lottery
• 20% minimum to good causes, legal basis: Gambling Act 2005, Schedule 11 (legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2005/19/schedule/11), and Gambling Commission "Lotteries and the Gambling Act 2005: administration and returns" guidance: gamblingcommission.gov.uk/guidance/lotteries-and-the-gambling-act-2005/lotteries-and-the-ga05-administration-and-returns
• Battersea raffle entry page, archived capture disclosing the 2024 figures (19 February 2025): web.archive.org/web/20250219174247/https://www.battersea.org.uk/support-us/other-ways-give/enter-our-raffle

Full research notes including remaining verification gaps: _research-battersea-superdraw-deep.md.