How a planned chimney demolition raised over £10,000 for Holyhead RNLI in seven days

A small lifeboat station turned a corporate partner's already-scheduled chimney demolition into a once-only prize, in memory of one of its own. Holyhead RNLI's Crowdfunder draw passed its £10,000 target in about seven days, drew more than 900 entrants, and ended on 20 March 2024 with Geraint Williams, a former North Sea commercial diver from Aberffraw, pressing the button that brought down a 122 m landmark at Prosperity Parc in 13 seconds.

The numbers are modest by national-charity standards. The interesting bit is how the prize itself was put together. Stena Line, which owns the former Anglesey Aluminium site, was going to demolish the chimney anyway as part of a redevelopment that has since been earmarked within the new Anglesey Freeport. The button-press was packaged as the prize. The cost to Stena Line was negligible because the work was already scheduled. The cost to the RNLI was almost certainly negligible: no source records any charge-back from Stena Line, and the reasonable reading is that the experience was donated in kind, though this is not stated explicitly in the public record. The novelty was high enough to earn coverage from the RNLI's own news desk, four regional press titles, and the local council, all of which functioned as free top-of-funnel promotion. The draw was also explicitly a memorial, dedicated to Holyhead crew member Iwan Williams, who had volunteered with the station since 1985 and died in 2023. That gave the campaign both a local emotional engine and a hard deadline: the demolition was happening on 20 March whether tickets sold or not.

At a glance

• Beneficiary: RNLI (charity number 209603), promoted by Holyhead RNLI
• Partner: Stena Line, site owner of Prosperity Parc, the former Anglesey Aluminium plant in Holyhead. Demolition itself carried out by Total Reclaims Demolition of Nottinghamshire
• Platform: Crowdfunder
• Mechanic: Paid-entry prize draw with a free postal entry route
• Ticket prices: £3, £5, £10, £25, £50, £100 (1, 2, 5, 15, 35, 80 entries respectively)
• Target: £10,000
• Raise: Over £10,000 (final exact figure not separately published)
• Time to hit target: About 7 days
• Tickets close: Monday 18 March 2024, 9am
• Entrants: More than 900
• Prize: A single grand prize: pressing the demolition button for a 122 m / 450 ft chimney stack, plus a guest and behind-the-scenes access on the day
• Winner: Geraint Williams, originally from Aberffraw, now living in St Asaph
• In memory of: Iwan Williams, Holyhead RNLI crew member since 1985, died 2023
• Demolition date: Wednesday 20 March 2024 (13 seconds, controlled explosion)

What the draw was

A paid-entry prize draw, run on Crowdfunder by RNLI Holyhead in aid of the wider RNLI. Each £3 bought one entry; the higher tiers ran up to £100 for 80 entries. A free postal entry route was available, which is the standard compliance mechanism that keeps a UK charity prize draw outside the Gambling Commission's lottery licensing regime: because anyone can enter without paying, it is not a lottery in law. None of the published coverage referred to it as a "free-entry" draw, and it should not be read as one. Paid tickets were the primary route and the source of the funds.

The draw was a single-winner format. One person won the experience; their guest came along. No tiered or runner-up prizes were offered.

The prize

A donated, one-off experience: the chance to press the trigger on a planned chimney demolition. The chimney had dominated the skyline at the old Anglesey Aluminium site for more than 50 years and had been redundant for about a decade since smelting ended there. Stena Line, the current site owner, was clearing the site for redevelopment, with the area earmarked as a customs and tax site within the Anglesey Freeport. The demolition would have happened with or without a prize draw; turning it into a prize was the creative addition.

This matters for fundraisers reading the case for a model rather than a story. Three things came free:

• The prize itself, because the underlying event was already scheduled and budgeted by a third party.
• The hard deadline, because the demolition date was fixed by engineering and traffic-management constraints, not marketing convenience. That gave the campaign genuine scarcity rather than manufactured urgency.
• The press hook, because a public button-press on a 122 m landmark is the sort of single-image story that regional desks and national charity comms teams both pick up.

The credit for sourcing the prize sits primarily with the corporate-charity relationship between Holyhead RNLI and Stena Line, both heavyweights in the local marine and port economy. The fit was specific to place. It is hard to imagine the same draw at the same value running well outside its immediate community.

Audience

The audience was, by design, local. Holyhead is a small port town on Anglesey, and the chimney was a landmark for everyone who could see it. Most entrants will have been drawn from three overlapping pools: the RNLI's existing Anglesey supporter base, the local community who knew either Iwan Williams or the chimney, and the marine and engineering networks around the port and the former smelter. The winner himself is illustrative of the cross-over: an Aberffraw-born former North Sea commercial diver. The press did not publish list-size data, and the Crowdfunder page is not publicly readable from outside the platform, so the relative weights of those pools are not knowable from the public record.

A 900-plus entrant count for a town-scale campaign with a likely real catchment across Anglesey and north Wales looks like a campaign that broke out of a narrow base. Coverage by national RNLI, four regional press titles, the council chief executive and both the local MP and MS plausibly explains the breakout, but the case study cannot prove which channel produced which entrants.

Marketing

The hook did most of the work: a memorial-driven, time-bound, visually unmistakable one-off. Promotion ran on a textbook small-charity stack: RNLI Holyhead's own social channels, an Anglesey Freeport announcement on day one of sales, regional press the same week, and a national RNLI news item on the day of demolition. Both the Welsh Government MS for Ynys Môn and the local MP made public statements about the demolition that put the cause back in the news cycle independently of the charity. No paid media has been identified in any source. The case is, in the main, an earned-media story riding on prize novelty plus the memorial framing.

What charity teams should take from this

1. Scout for "scheduled-anyway" partner moments before you scout for prizes. The cheapest, most press-worthy charity prize draws are not "we found a Rolex"; they are "we found a corporate partner whose planned-anyway one-off event we can co-opt as a prize." That includes ribbon-cuttings, openings, last shifts, decommissionings, knock-downs, naming ceremonies, factory tours and behind-the-scenes access on routine but newsworthy operations. The partner pays no extra. You pay nothing. Both sides earn the press. Holyhead RNLI did not invent this category, but it is a clean worked example of it at small-charity scale.

2. Pin the draw to an immovable real-world date. A hard external deadline that the charity does not control is a stronger close-out lever than any "ends at midnight" countdown the team can set. The chimney was coming down on 20 March whether the appeal hit target or not. That gave the appeal a credible last-chance moment without the team having to manufacture one. If a partner moment has a fixed date, use it as the deadline, not a soft marketing deadline two weeks earlier.

3. Decide single-winner versus tiered prizes deliberately, not by default. A single donated experience is the cleanest possible structure: one prize, one story, one named winner whose photo carries the press cycle. The trade-off is fewer winners as social proof and less spread across spend levels. Holyhead RNLI went single-winner because the prize was structurally indivisible (only one person could press the button). Where a prize is divisible (tickets, vouchers, kit), a tiered structure may convert more entrants and produce more shareable winner stories. Neither is "best practice"; the case for each depends on what the prize is.

What this case study does not claim

The "over £10,000" figure is a verified floor from RNLI's own news report and regional press; the precise final raise was not separately published, and the Crowdfunder leaf page is not publicly readable for verification. Net to the charity, after Crowdfunder fees and any payment processing, is not in the public record either. RNLI's standard policy splits money raised at a named station between local and central funds, and the specific split for this draw is not disclosed. Whether Stena Line charged the RNLI anything for the prize itself is not in the public record; the case treats it as a donated experience on the basis that no source records a charge-back, but this is inference not audited fact. The case study presents the campaign as a worked example of a transferable prize-sourcing model; it does not assert this draw was uniquely "smart" or that any one structural choice (single winner, £3 entry, seven-day window, memorial framing) caused the outcome.

Sources

Verified 2026-06-03.

• RNLI news, 20 March 2024, "Winner of prize draw in aid of Holyhead RNLI presses button to demolish chimney", at https://rnli.org/news-and-media/2024/march/20/winner-of-prize-draw-in-aid-of-holyhead-rnli-presses-button-to-demolish-chimney (primary)
• Anglesey Freeport, 11 March 2024, "Holyhead chimney stack demolition prize draw in aid of the RNLI", at https://angleseyfreeport.co.uk/2024/03/11/holyhead-chimney-stack-demolition-prize-draw-in-aid-of-the-rnli/ (partner announcement, ticket tiers and dates)
• Wales247, 11 March 2024, "Holyhead chimney stack demolition prize draw for charity", at https://www.wales247.co.uk/holyhead-chimney-stack-demolition-prize-draw-for-charity
• Herald.Wales, "Holyhead chimney stack demolition prize draw in aid of the RNLI", at https://www.herald.wales/north-wales/anglesey/holyhead-chimney-stack-demolition-prize-draw-in-aid-of-the-rnli/
• North Wales Chronicle, "Date Holyhead chimney demolition will take place", at https://www.northwaleschronicle.co.uk/news/24181733.date-holyhead-chimney-demolition-will-take-place/
• North Wales Chronicle, "Holyhead chimney demolition prize draw in aid of RNLI", at https://www.northwaleschronicle.co.uk/news/24177713.holyhead-chimney-demolition-prize-draw-aid-rnli/
• Denbighshire Free Press, "Amazing photos of chimney stack demolition on Anglesey", at https://www.denbighshirefreepress.co.uk/news/24202890.amazing-photos-chimney-stack-demolition-anglesey/ (named quotes from the winner, Holyhead RNLI Coxswain Tony Price, Stena Line's Ian Davies and Anglesey Council CE Dylan J Williams)
• North Wales Live (Daily Post), "Holyhead chimney demolition 'secret' ingredient that enabled 13 seconds of 'controlled chaos'", at https://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/holyhead-chimney-demolition-secret-ingredient-29053079 (demolition contractor and engineering detail)
• RNLI fundraising portal, at https://fundraise.rnli.org/fundraisers/Holyhead/stations (registered charity number and local / central fundraising split policy)

See factsheet.md for the source-by-source, claim-by-claim audit with confidence ratings.