Glastonbury raised £1,044,190 in 21 days for the DEC Turkey-Syria earthquake appeal by running its festival tickets as a £10 prize draw

In February 2023, a week after a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck Turkey and Syria, Glastonbury Festival put ten pairs of its sold out 2023 weekend tickets up as the prize on a £10 Crowdfunder draw for Oxfam's contribution to the DEC Turkey-Syria Earthquake Appeal. The draw opened on 15 February and closed 21 days later on 8 March. It raised £1,044,190 from 46,932 supporters. Crowdfunder later ranked it the number one project across all its categories for the year, ahead of every product launch, creative project and business raise on the platform, not just every other prize draw.

What makes this case useful is not the headline figure on its own. It is that almost the same inventory had been sold a different way the week before, and we can see what each method produced. From 6 to 13 February 2023, Glastonbury auctioned the same kind of tickets and money-can't-buy experiences on eBay for the Trussell Trust, and raised £116,738. Comparable inventory, run as a £10 draw rather than an auction, raised roughly nine times as much. That comparison is the spine of this case, and it needs handling honestly, because two things changed at once and only one of them is the format.

The honest version is this. The auction concentrates giving among a handful of high bidders. The £10 draw opens participation to anyone Glastonbury-curious, so tens of thousands of small contributions can outscale a few large ones. That is a real structural effect and it is the transferable part. But the auction raised money for UK food banks, and the draw raised money for an acute, named humanitarian disaster at the peak of global attention. Cause salience plausibly did some of the work too. The right framing is format plus cause salience, not format alone. We say so below rather than claiming the mechanic was the only lever.

At a glance

• Raise: £1,044,190 for the DEC Turkey-Syria Earthquake Appeal, via Oxfam GB
• Supporters: 46,932, per Glastonbury's own results page and the Crowdfunder project page
• Duration: 21 days, from 08:00 on 15 February 2023 to 12:00 on 8 March 2023
• Platform: Crowdfunder, with the platform fee waived so the full £10 entry reached Oxfam
• Entry: £10 per entry online, with a free postal entry route as the legal compliance route
• Prize: ten pairs of Glastonbury 2023 weekend tickets, each bundled with a money-can't-buy festival experience, donated by the festival
• Average per supporter: roughly £22.25 across the campaign, which against a £10 entry implies widespread multi-entry buying
• Entry cap: up to £100 for ten entries per person, per Timeout (single source)
• Benchmark: the same kind of inventory raised £116,738 as an eBay auction for the Trussell Trust the week before, from 6 to 13 February 2023

What the draw was

A UK paid entry prize draw on Crowdfunder. Entry was £10 online through a dedicated project page, promoted by Glastonbury via a short link. A free postal entry route was available and counted equally, which is what keeps a paid entry prize draw outside the lottery licensing regime under the Gambling Act 2005. The product being sold was paid entries. The free route exists because the law requires it, not because it is the marketing proposition. Calling this a free entry draw would describe it backwards.

Crowdfunder waived its platform fee, which is its standard practice for prize draws, so the full £10 of each entry went to Oxfam for the DEC appeal. Standard payment processing costs still apply, as they do on any online donation. The draw ran for exactly 21 days. Oxfam GB created and managed the project, with the festival donating the prize and supplying the promotion.

The prize

Ten pairs of general admission weekend tickets to Glastonbury 2023, donated directly by the festival. A pair was worth roughly £670 at face value, with single tickets at £335 plus a booking fee in 2023, up from £280 the year before, a rise of about a fifth. Those tickets were also genuinely scarce: general sale had sold out in about an hour on 6 November 2022, and coach and ticket packages in around 22 minutes. For most of the public, the £10 draw was the only remaining route to a 2023 ticket.

What separated this from an ordinary ticket draw is that every pair was bundled with a specific access experience that money does not usually buy. A Pyramid Stage side viewing platform place. An Other Stage viewing platform place. Introducing an act on The Park stage. A small advertisement in the Glastonbury Free Press. A West Holts backstage tour with stage pit access. A pre-show site tour. The Glastonbury-On-Sea experience. The Common experience. None of these cost the festival anything extra to provide, and each one lifted the perceived value of a prize well above the face value of two tickets. The lever was access, not luxury. There was no hospitality, camping upgrade or travel in the bundles.

The audience and the channel

The reach engine was Glastonbury's own platforms, not a charity supporter list. That distinction matters. People follow Glastonbury for festival news, not for humanitarian appeals, so this was a music warm audience being asked to give, rather than a donor warm audience. It worked because the draw offered that audience the one thing it was already chasing, a 2023 ticket it could no longer buy, in exchange for supporting a cause that was at the peak of public attention.

Glastonbury announced the draw through its festival website and its main social channels on launch day. Oxfam added its own channels, including a launch post from its online shop account, and a press release. The campaign then drew a wave of earned coverage with no paid promotion behind it. We have not independently verified Glastonbury's exact follower numbers as at February 2023, so we describe the audience as a very large, festival-warm consumer base rather than attaching a precise figure to it.

The marketing

Owned and earned, with effectively no paid spend.

• Glastonbury Festival website news post on launch day
• Glastonbury main social channels, launch day, 15 February 2023
• Oxfam social channels and an Oxfam press release
• Earned coverage including NME on 15 February, ITV News West Country and Timeout on 16 February, and Charity Times on 17 February

The pace was front-loaded. Press reporting at the time describes the draw passing its initial £600,000 target within two days and reaching over £680,000 within five days, with the target then raised in stages. That pattern, most of the money in the first week, fits a campaign riding a news moment rather than a slow burn.

The eBay benchmark, handled honestly

This is the part the case turns on, so it is worth being precise. From 6 to 13 February 2023, the week before the draw launched, Glastonbury ran an eBay auction of the same kind of asset, pairs of 2023 tickets bundled with money-can't-buy experiences, for the Trussell Trust. It raised £116,738. The draw, with comparable inventory, raised £1,044,190. That is a multiple of roughly nine.

Two variables moved between the two. The format changed, from an auction that concentrates giving among a few high bidders to a £10 draw that converts a large audience into many small contributions. And the cause changed, from UK food banks to an acute, named overseas disaster at the peak of global attention. Both plausibly mattered. We treat the format effect as the transferable lesson, because it is structural and repeatable, while flagging that the cause-salience difference means you should not read the full ninefold gap as pure format. The structural point stands on its own even after you discount for the cause: a £10 draw can reach a participation base an auction cannot.

What charity teams should take from this

Three lessons, each defensible at face value and at a board meeting.

1. The format decides who can take part, and that often decides the total. An auction is won by a few people with deep pockets. A £10 draw is open to anyone, so the ceiling is set by audience size rather than by the wealth of the top bidders. Glastonbury's own week-on-week comparison shows the size of that difference, roughly ninefold here. If you hold a scarce, desirable asset and you are auctioning it, the honest question is whether a low-priced draw would convert far more of your audience. The caveat is that the 2023 multiple also rode an exceptional cause moment, so treat the format effect as real but do not expect nine times every time.

2. A donated, scarce asset turns a draw into a near-pure raise. Glastonbury gave the tickets, so the prize cost the campaign nothing, and Crowdfunder waived its fee, so the full entry reached the charity. The economics only work this cleanly when the prize is owned inventory rather than something the charity has to buy. The most transferable move is to find an asset-holder who can donate something their audience already wants, rather than buying a prize and hoping the maths works.

3. Speed against a real moment is part of the mechanic, not a bonus. The draw launched nine days after the earthquake, while public attention and willingness to give were at their height, and ran for three weeks. The asset-holder needed nothing new to do it: an existing audience, an existing platform, an existing prize pool and one charity partner. The readiness to move inside days, on infrastructure that already exists, is what let the campaign meet the moment. That readiness is what a charity can prepare for in advance, even though the moment itself cannot be scheduled.

Repeatability

The draw is now an annual Glastonbury fixture, including in years with no festival. It ran again in 2024 and in 2025, when the draw offered the first Glastonbury 2027 tickets, 2026 being a fallow year.

Year	Prizes	Beneficiary	Entry	Draw raise	Notes
2023	10 pairs plus experiences	Oxfam, for the DEC Turkey-Syria appeal	£10	£1,044,190	46,932 supporters, 21 days, no match funding
2024	20 pairs	British Red Cross, Oxfam, War Child	£10	£639,720	33,606 supporters, 26 days, matched by the festival to £1,279,440
2025	25 pairs	Médecins Sans Frontières UK	£10	£929,480	First Glastonbury 2027 tickets, closed November 2025

Two things stand out across the three years. The £10 entry price held throughout. And the 2023 draw drew the most supporters, 46,932, despite offering the fewest prizes, ten pairs against twenty in 2024. The most likely explanation is the one this case keeps returning to: 2023 ran against a specific, named crisis at peak attention, while 2024 was framed around the broader cause of people affected by conflict. That is consistent with cause salience mattering, which is exactly why we decline to attribute the 2023 result to format alone.

What this case study doesn't claim

• We do not claim the format change was the sole cause of the ninefold gap over the eBay auction. The auction supported UK food banks and the draw supported an acute, named disaster at peak attention, and that difference plausibly accounts for part of the gap. The transferable claim is narrower: a low-priced draw can reach a participation base an auction cannot.
• We do not claim £1,044,190 is a baseline an arbitrary charity could expect. It required a globally famous brand, a sold out and donated scarce asset, a very large warm consumer audience the brand already owned, a fee-waiving platform and an exceptional cause moment. Remove any one of those and the figure should be expected to fall, in some cases sharply.
• We do not present the draw as part of Glastonbury's £3.7m record charitable giving for 2023. The festival's own statement reports the DEC draw separately, "in addition to" that £3.7m, so the two figures should not be combined or expressed as a percentage of each other.
• We have not independently verified Glastonbury's exact social follower counts as at February 2023, so we do not attach a precise reach number to the campaign.

Sources

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

• Glastonbury Festival, results post for the 2023 Oxfam DEC prize draw, glastonburyfestivals.co.uk/news/enter-our-oxfam-prize-draw-for-glastonbury-2023-tickets-experiences/. Primary source for £1,044,190, 46,932 supporters, the 21 day window and the prize. Reliability High.
• Glastonbury Festival, "Bid for Glastonbury 2023 tickets and experiences in aid of Trussell Trust", glastonburyfestivals.co.uk/news/bid-for-glastonbury-2023-tickets-experiences-in-aid-of-trussell-trust/. Primary source for the eBay auction running 6 to 13 February 2023 and the experiences bundled into the auction lots.
• Weston Mercury, "Glastonbury Festival auction raises £116,738 for The Trussell Trust", thewestonmercury.co.uk/news/23323470.glastonbury-festival-donates-auction-proceeds-trussell-trust/. Primary source for the £116,738 auction figure and the 6 to 13 February 2023 dates. Reliability High.
• Oxfam GB press release, glastonbury-fans-have-chance-to-win-festival-tickets-by-supporting-dec-turkey-syria-earthquake-appeal, oxfam.org.uk. Source for the £10 entry, the prize, Oxfam's administering role and the DEC beneficiary.
• NME, Tom Skinner, 15 February 2023, nme.com/news/music/glastonbury-win-tickets-supporting-dec-turkey-syria-earthquake-appeal-3399163. Trade press, launch-day coverage of mechanic, prize and cause.
• Charity Times, 17 February 2023, charitytimes.com/ct/Glastonbury-festival-and-Oxfam-Earthquake-appeal-smashes-targets-within-days.php. Source for the early fundraising pace and target increases.
• Timeout UK, 16 February 2023, timeout.com/uk/news/oxfam-has-launched-a-competition-to-win-glastonbury-tickets-heres-how-to-enter-021623. Source for the £10 entry and the £100 ten-entry cap.
• ITV News West Country, 16 February 2023, itv.com/news/westcountry/2023-02-16/the-glastonbury-ticket-prize-draw-raising-money-for-earthquake-victims. Regional coverage of the draw.
• UK Fundraising, 20 March 2024, fundraising.co.uk/2024/03/20/oxfam-glastonbury-project-crowned-number-1-in-crowdfunders-top-100-of-the-last-12-months/. Source for the Crowdfunder number one ranking. Reliability High.
• Glastonbury Festival, "Festival donates over £3.7m to charitable causes and campaigns", glastonburyfestivals.co.uk/news/charitable-support-2023/. Primary source confirming the DEC draw was reported "in addition to" the £3.7m total, and corroborating the £116,000 Trussell Trust auction.
• Glastonbury Festival, 2024 prize draw final total post, glastonburyfestivals.co.uk/news/enter-our-prize-draw-for-glastonbury-2024-tickets/. Primary source for the 2024 figures: £639,720 from 33,606 supporters over 26 days, matched by the festival to £1,279,440.
• Crowdfunder, MSF UK 2027 prize draw project page, crowdfunder.co.uk/p/glastonbury-festival-prize-draw, and MSF UK newsroom, prezly.msf.org.uk/glastonbury-festival-support-msfs-work-through-prize-draw. Source for the 2025 draw raising £929,480 for MSF UK for the first Glastonbury 2027 tickets.
• NME, 6 November 2022, glastonbury-2023-ticket-and-coach-packages-sell-out-in-22-minutes, nme.com. Source for the 2023 sell out timing and the £335 ticket price, up from £280 in 2022.
• Crowdfunder UK Help Centre, "Prize Draws", help.crowdfunder.co.uk/en/articles/5367006-prize-draws. Source for the prize draw product, the free entry route, and the platform fee being waived on prize draws.