Annie Lennox's SISTERS prize draw raised £25,390 in 20 days for The Circle by raffling access to a sold out Royal Albert Hall show

In February 2025, a month before International Women's Day, the inaugural SISTERS: Annie Lennox and Friends concert at the Royal Albert Hall sold out almost immediately, within minutes by Lennox's own account. That sell out is the starting condition for this case, not a footnote. With no tickets left to buy, For One Night Only (FONO), a dedicated prize draw operator, opened a Crowdfunder paid entry prize draw offering the only remaining way in: 15 pairs of tickets to the show, each with an invitation to join a very small group at Annie Lennox's soundcheck beforehand. Entries cost £10 each, in bundles from £10 to £200. The draw closed at midnight on 23 February, having raised £25,390 from 1,218 supporters in 20 days, as displayed on the campaign page's final totals.

Annie Lennox did not lend her name to The Circle; she co-founded it, alongside other leading women, seventeen years earlier, and the SISTERS concert was her organisation's own flagship event, timed to land two days before International Women's Day. "I'm thrilled we can still offer a chance to attend, via the For One Night Only prize draw, which includes access to the show and my soundcheck," she said in the announcement. When the celebrity is the cause's founder, the draw inherits a kind of trust that a borrowed endorsement cannot buy, and Lennox promoted it herself, on her own site, alongside The Circle's channels and the music press covering the lineup.

Within the larger event, the £25,390 was not the SISTERS fundraiser; it was a side channel bolted onto a sold out concert that was itself raising money for The Circle through ticket sales. The draw's job was narrower and cleverer than headline fundraising: it monetised the demand left over after the box office closed. Everyone who missed out on tickets at the box office became the draw's natural audience, and the prize, access plus soundcheck, was something no amount of money could buy on the open market. Read that way, the case is a model for any charity whose event sells out: the sell out is not the end of the revenue, it is the start of the draw.

At a glance

• Raise: £25,390 from 1,218 supporters, Crowdfunder campaign page (final totals as displayed). This is the draw alone, not the SISTERS event's total fundraising
• Duration: 20 days, closing at midnight on 23 February 2025, which places launch on or around 4 February, the same day the lineup announcement went out
• Platform: Crowdfunder, operator listed as For One Night Only
• Mechanic: paid entry prize draw at a flat £10 per entry (tiers £10 for 1 up to £200 for 20), with the free postal route required under the Gambling Act 2005, both capped at 20 entries per person, UK residents 18 and over
• Prize: 15 pairs of tickets to the sold out SISTERS: Annie Lennox and Friends concert at the Royal Albert Hall on 6 March 2025, plus soundcheck access
• Beneficiary: The Circle, the global women's rights organisation Annie Lennox co-founded, registered charity 1160293 in England and Wales
• Operator structure: FONO is run by HTYT Limited, a private limited company (number 11499942), not a charity; FONO states that proceeds go to the charity after administrative costs
• Average per supporter: £20.85 (£25,390 divided by 1,218), roughly two £10 entries each

What the draw was

A multi-winner paid entry prize draw on Crowdfunder, run by FONO on The Circle's behalf. Entrants paid £10 per entry, choosing a bundle between £10 and £200, with a hard cap of 20 paid entries each. A free postal route, also capped at 20 entries, kept the draw outside the lottery licensing regime of the Gambling Act 2005. That postal route is compliance plumbing: the product being sold, and the thing every piece of promotion was designed to convert, was paid entries.

The pricing structure is often misread as discounting. It is not. Every tier prices entries at exactly £10 each; £200 buys 20 entries, not 25. The tiers do something different: they let supporters self-select their stake without the operator ever lowering the unit price. The final figures are consistent with that working. At £20.85 per supporter on average, the typical entrant bought roughly two entries, double the £10 floor, and the headroom to £200 let superfans go much further. A single price point offers no such headroom.

The multi-winner format is the other deliberate choice. Fifteen pairs meant fifteen winning entrants. With 1,218 supporters, that is roughly one winning entrant per 81 supporters (a TPDC calculation from the displayed totals; actual odds per entry were longer, since the average supporter held about two entries). Either way, these are visibly better odds than a single-prize celebrity draw, and the campaign could say so. When the prize is access rather than an object, multiplying winners costs the operator very little and lifts the perceived value of every entry.

The prize

A pair of tickets to a show that money could no longer buy, plus admission to a moment that money could never buy. The SISTERS lineup, Annie Lennox headlining with Celeste, Nadine Shah, Ríoghnach Connolly and special guest speaker Misan Harriman announced in advance, and Hozier, Paloma Faith, Beverley Knight and Lola Lennox joining on the night, made the tickets themselves scarce and desirable. The soundcheck invitation is what made the prize a prize. A very small group, in the Royal Albert Hall, watching Annie Lennox prepare. There is no resale market for that, no face value to compare an entry price against, and no way to acquire it other than winning.

This is the recurring pattern in operator-run celebrity experience draws: the prize is manufactured out of access the artist can grant at near zero marginal cost. Fifteen pairs of house tickets and an open soundcheck door cost the production almost nothing. The draw converted them into £25,390. For a charity with a figurehead who performs, speaks or appears anywhere with a guest list, this is among the cheapest genuinely scarce prize inventory there is.

The operator and the money

FONO sits between the artist and the charity, and it is worth being precise about what it is. For One Night Only is not a charity. It is a fundraising venture operated by HTYT Limited, a private limited company incorporated in 2018 and registered in England and Wales under number 11499942, with registered activities in film and television production. FONO launched its draw model in 2022 with an Ed Sheeran event and has repeated it serially since, including Eddie Izzard's solo preview of Great Expectations at the Charles Dickens Museum, Dickens's former London home, and this campaign. Its own positioning: the biggest names in music, entertainment and sport donate their time to create experiences money can't buy, and fans donate to enter.

For The Circle, the structure meant the charity did not run the draw, hold the Crowdfunder relationship, or carry the fulfilment. FONO states that proceeds go to the charity after administrative costs are deducted. We could not find a public itemisation of those costs or of the exact sum The Circle received from this draw, and the £25,390 should be read as the gross raise on the platform, not as a verified net transfer to the charity. That is not an accusation, it is a structural feature of operator-run draws that any charity considering one should price in: the operator layer buys convenience and repeatable expertise, and costs margin and data ownership.

The draw and the event

The honest way to size this draw is against the event it served, and the timeline tells the story. The lineup announcement went out on 4 February 2025; the draw opened on or around the same day and rode the entire pre-event press cycle, with coverage in Music Week and across the music press, promotion on annielennox.com and The Circle's own channels, and the show's sold out status doing the urgency work that countdown clocks usually fake. The draw closed on 23 February, eleven days before the concert, presumably to allow winner verification and fulfilment.

So the cultural timing thesis holds, but one level up from where you might expect. The draw itself was not pinned to International Women's Day; the event was, deliberately, landing two days before it inside Women's History Month. The draw simply inherited that relevance, along with the event's press, its lineup announcements and its sell out. A draw bolted to a culturally timed event gets the timing for free. A standalone draw has to manufacture its own moment, which is far harder.

And the founder authenticity thesis holds with a caveat that the numbers force on us. Lennox co-founding The Circle is plainly part of why the press, the artists and the audience treated SISTERS as her cause rather than a booking, and the draw benefited from that trust. But FONO's Ed Sheeran draw, the same operator, the same mechanic, the same £10 paid entry logic, showed £163,850 on its Crowdfunder page, more than six times this campaign's total, with a supporter-performer rather than a founder-performer. (Shout, that draw's beneficiary, announced the event raised more than £200,000 in total; we use the £163,850 Crowdfunder page figure here because it is like for like with this campaign's £25,390, and the gap only widens at the larger number.) Authenticity did not set the ceiling. The size of the artist's active, mobilisable fanbase and the volume of prize inventory on offer did: Sheeran's draw had hundreds of winning slots against a far larger fan base, while SISTERS offered 15 pairs to an audience that, in our reading rather than any published data, skews older and engages less compulsively online. This is the strongest available reading of a two-campaign comparison, and the confounds are real: different cause, different year, different press cycle. The transferable conclusion is that founder authenticity is a trust multiplier on whatever audience exists. It is not a substitute for the audience.

What charity teams should take from this

1. Sell out first, then draw. The draw's entire proposition was created by the box office closing. Once the show sold out almost immediately, access became unbuyable, and the draw became the only route in for everyone who missed out. A charity running a high demand event should plan the draw as the second act of the sell out: hold back a small allocation of tickets plus one piece of access (soundcheck, side of stage, meet the team), and open the draw the moment "sold out" becomes the headline. The sell out is not the end of the revenue; it is the marketing for the draw.

2. Price entries flat, tier the baskets. Every bundle here cost exactly £10 per entry; the tiers changed stake, not price. That preserved the value of an entry while letting supporters self-select between £10 and £200, and the result was an average spend of £20.85, roughly double the floor. The mistake to avoid is bulk discounting (say, £200 for 25 entries), which trains your most committed supporters to expect their generosity to be cheaper per unit.

3. Multiply winners when the prize is access. Fifteen pairs cost the production almost nothing more than one pair, and produced roughly one winning entrant per 81 supporters, odds the campaign could honestly trade on. Object prizes get more expensive with every winner added; access prizes barely do. If your prize is admission to something, the question is not whether you can afford more winners but why you would offer fewer.

4. Let the event carry the timing, and the draw inherit it. SISTERS was pinned to International Women's Day; the draw was pinned to SISTERS. It launched alongside the lineup announcement and drafted behind every piece of event press for 20 days without buying any media of its own. The general form: do not try to make a draw culturally relevant. Make the event culturally relevant, and bolt the draw to the event's announcement cycle.

5. The operator layer is a trade, so make it knowingly. FONO brought a proven format, the Crowdfunder operation, and serial experience across artists. It also sits between the donor and the charity as a private company deducting administrative costs, and the entrant relationship belongs to the operator's campaign, not the charity's database. For a one-off draw around a major event, that trade often makes sense. For a charity that intends to run draws repeatedly, building the capability in-house keeps both the margin and the audience.

What this case study doesn't claim

• The £25,390 and 1,218 supporter figures are the final totals as displayed on the Crowdfunder campaign page, recorded first-hand. No press source we found independently cites the final raise.
• We do not claim this figure represents the SISTERS event's fundraising for The Circle. The concert raised money through its own ticket sales, which sold out almost immediately; that total is not public, and the draw should be read as a side channel to it, not the main event.
• We do not claim The Circle received £25,390 net. FONO states proceeds go to the charity after administrative costs, and no public breakdown of those costs, or Crowdfunder's fees, exists for this campaign.
• The launch date of on or around 4 February 2025 is inferred from the 20 day duration and the 23 February close, and is consistent with the lineup announcement date; we found no source stating it directly.
• The "roughly two entries per supporter" and "one winning entrant per 81 supporters" figures are TPDC calculations from the displayed totals, shown with their working above; they assume all funds came through the entry tiers and exclude free postal entrants, whose numbers are not public.
• The Ed Sheeran comparison uses the £163,850 final total displayed on that draw's Crowdfunder page, recorded in our separate case study of it. Shout announced the event raised more than £200,000 in total; we make no claim about which figure better represents that event's full proceeds, only that the campaign-page figures are the like-for-like pair.
• The observation that the SISTERS draw audience skews older and engages less online is a TPDC reading, not published data; the prize-volume difference (15 pairs against hundreds of winning slots) carries the comparison regardless.

Sources

Verified 2026-06-12. Reliability noted where it matters.

• Crowdfunder campaign page, "SISTERS: Annie Lennox & Friends | FONO Prize Draw", operator For One Night Only, at crowdfunder.co.uk/p/fono-annie-lennox. Cloudflare 403 on direct fetch; title and operator visible in search engine indexes. Primary source for the £25,390 raised, 1,218 supporters, 20 day duration and entry tiers (final totals as displayed, recorded first-hand).
• The Circle, "Win a pair of tickets to SISTERS: Annie Lennox & Friends", at thecircle.ngo/news/win-a-pair-of-tickets-to-sisters-annie-lennox-friends. Primary source for the 15 pairs, soundcheck access, beneficiary and The Circle's registration (charity 1160293, company 08993335). Reliability High.
• Annie Lennox official site, 4 February 2025, "SISTERS: Annie Lennox and friends line up announced", at annielennox.com/sisters-annie-lennox-and-friends-line-up-announced. Source for the sell out (within minutes by Lennox's own account; The Circle's page says within hours, so the body text uses "almost immediately"), the 23 February entry deadline, the lineup, and the International Women's Day timing.
• For One Night Only, "Sisters: Annie Lennox & Friends", at foronenightonly.org/sisters-annie-lennox-friends. Primary source for FONO's self-description, the £10 entry, the prize, and the operator disclosure that FONO is operated by HTYT Limited (company 11499942).
• Companies House, register entry for HTYT Limited (company 11499942), at find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/11499942. Source for HTYT's legal status, incorporation (3 August 2018) and registered activities. Reliability High.
• Ultimate Eurythmics, February 2025, "You've got to be in it to win it!", at eurythmics-ultimate.com. Source for the 20 entry caps (online and postal), the UK 18+ restriction, the free postal route, FONO's 2022 launch with Ed Sheeran, the proceeds-after-administrative-costs statement, and the Annie Lennox quote promoting the draw. Fan press, reliability Medium; factual claims corroborated by The Circle and FONO pages.
• Ultimate Eurythmics, March 2025, "Annie Lennox is a Shining Light at the Royal Albert Hall", at eurythmics-ultimate.com. Source for the concert taking place on 6 March 2025 and the full on-the-night lineup including Hozier, Paloma Faith, Beverley Knight and Lola Lennox.
• Music Week, "Celeste, Ríoghnach Connolly and Nadine Shah to perform at Sisters: Annie Lennox And Friends", at musicweek.com/live/read/celeste-r-oghnach-connolly-and-nadine-shah-to-perform-at-sisters-annie-lennox-and-friends/091339. Trade press corroboration of the lineup and event. Reliability High.
• Marshall Arts, "Special guests announced as part of SISTERS: Annie Lennox and Friends", at marshall-arts.com/news-articles/special-guests-announced-as-part-of-sisters-annie-lennox-and-friends. Promoter corroboration of the event and guests.
• Charity Commission for England and Wales, register entry for The Circle (registered charity 1160293), at register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/charity-details/?regid=1160293. Source for charity registration. Reliability High.
• Crowdfunder UK Help Centre, "Prize Draws", at help.crowdfunder.co.uk/en/articles/5367006-prize-draws. Source for the platform's prize draw product and the role of the free entry route.
• Crowdfunder campaign page for the FONO Ed Sheeran draw, operator For One Night Only, at crowdfunder.co.uk/p/for-one-night-only-ed-sheeran. Source for the £163,850 Ed Sheeran comparison figure (campaign page total, per the separate TPDC case study on that draw). Shout's announcement at giveusashout.org states the event raised more than £200,000 in total; the Crowdfunder page figure is used here so the comparison is like for like with this campaign's £25,390.
• Shout, "For One Night Only", at giveusashout.org/for-one-night-only, and For One Night Only, Eddie Izzard charity prize draw terms and conditions, at foronenightonly.org/eddie-izzard-charity-prize-draw-terms-and-conditions. Source for Ed Sheeran performing in aid of Shout (no patronage claimed) and for Eddie Izzard's solo preview of Great Expectations at the Charles Dickens Museum, 48 Doughty Street, Dickens's former London home.