How a Scottish artist's annual Christmas draw raised £138,514 in 13 days for four charities

Hope Blamire's 2023 Christmas prize draw was Crowdfunder's top project of the year. It was also her seventh, and the audience had been building since 2017. Here is what charity teams can take from a model that depends partly on a single recognisable person.

Raised
£138,514
Year
2023
Platform
Crowdfunder
Duration
13 days
Entry price
£2
Supporters
7,958

An independent breakdown by The Prize Draw Company. We did not run this draw. We studied it.

Christmas 2023, Crowdfunder named a paid-entry prize draw run by a single artist as the top project on its platform that year. Hope Blamire, a Scottish seascape painter with a studio near Bath, raised £138,514 in about 13 days from 7,958 supporters for four registered charities. It is the kind of headline that lands on a fundraiser's desk, gets forwarded, and prompts the question: how would we do that.

The honest answer is that the 2023 draw was the seventh in an annual series. The first was a £1,500 raffle of a bottle of gin in 2016, in memory of Hope's late mother-in-law, for Cancer Research. The series became a fixture after the May 2017 Manchester Arena attack killed Eilidh MacLeod, a 14-year-old from Barra with a personal connection to Hope's work and following. From there, the draw climbed: £11,000 (2017), £14,300 (2018), £17,000 (2019), then a sudden step change to £132,000 (2020), and a high plateau across 2021 to 2024. The 2023 result is the high point of a long curve, not a standing start.

That changes the question. The transferable thing here is not "an artist did a charity raffle and it went viral." It is the structural choice to build a paid-entry moment on top of an existing relationship with a warm audience, repeat it annually, source the prizes from the audience itself, and spread the proceeds across multiple causes so multiple supporter communities show up at the same time. Two of those three components copy cleanly. The third, a single recognisable person with a public following of tens of thousands, does not.

At a glance

  • Subject: Hope Blamire Annual Christmas Charity Prize Draw 2023
  • Platform: Crowdfunder (UK), Prize Draws product
  • Gross raised on the platform: £138,514 over about 13 days
  • Supporters: 7,958 unique pledgers (Crowdfunder's count)
  • Ticket price (paid entry): £2 per ticket
  • Free entry route: Free postal entry available, as required by the Gambling Act 2005 and Crowdfunder's platform rules
  • Prize bundle: Over 100 prizes, donated to the draw, across artwork, jewellery, vouchers, learning courses, home decor, and holidays across the Western Isles and the mainland
  • Beneficiaries (all registered charities):
    • Scotland's Charity Air Ambulance, OSCR SC041845
    • Calum's Cabin, OSCR SC038054
    • Eilidh's Trust (Eilidh MacLeod Memorial Trust), Charity Commission 1180467
    • Beautiful Inside & Out (SCIO), OSCR SC044868
  • Split: Listed together by the artist; treating the gross as an equal four-way split implies about £34,628 per charity before Crowdfunder fees come off the top. The 2024 draw was an explicit equal four-way split; earlier draws in the series have used uneven splits.
  • Position in series: Year 7 of an annual series running since 2017 (precursor one-off in 2016).
  • Crowdfunder ranking: Top of Crowdfunder's Top 100 projects of 2023 per Crowdfunder's own editorial.

What the draw actually was

A paid-entry prize draw on Crowdfunder's Prize Draws product, live for approximately 13 days in December 2023. Supporters bought £2 tickets via the platform, with a free postal entry route offered to keep the draw legal as a prize draw rather than a lottery (a free entry route is a hard regulatory requirement on this product under the Gambling Act 2005). The winners were drawn live by Hope on her own Facebook page, in line with the broadcast model the series uses each year.

The prize structure was a bundle of more than 100 individual prizes rather than a single hero jackpot. That is structurally important. A 100+ prize bundle means many winners are announced on draw night, which gives supporters several real chances at small wins instead of a remote chance at one large win. It also means the prize sourcing has to come from many places, which is itself part of the audience activation: each donated prize is something a partner brand or individual has reason to talk about.

The proceeds went to four registered charities. Hope picks the beneficiaries each year and the slate rotates: Eilidh's Trust has appeared in most years of the series from 2019 onwards, while the other beneficiaries rotate. The 2023 slate of four sits in causes that are emotionally proximate to Hope's own life and audience: a Scottish air ambulance, a children's cancer respite charity on the Isle of Bute, a music-education trust on Barra established after the Manchester Arena attack, and a suicide-bereavement support charity.

Prize: donated bundle, not own production

The prize bundle is not made up of Hope's own paintings. It is donated to the draw by brand partners and individual supporters. Hope's own page makes this explicit, with an open invitation: "If you would like to donate a prize, please email Hope." For the 2021 draw, public reporting recorded around 150 prizes including 24 UK holidays plus one Florida trip, car hire, holiday homes, wildlife trips, Harris Tweed, artwork, jewellery and island spirits. The 2023 bundle is structurally similar, with the Crowdfunder editorial noting artwork, jewellery, vouchers, learning courses, home decor and holidays across the Hebrides and the mainland.

Two things follow from a donated bundle of this shape.

First, the cost of goods to the four charities is effectively zero. Almost all of the gross raise flows through to the four charities minus only Crowdfunder's platform fees and payment processing on each ticket transaction. This is the same economics as a community-sourced raffle table at a village fete, run at internet scale.

Second, donated prizes are a form of audience-building in their own right. Every donor has a reason to share the draw with their own followers, because their prize is on it. Over seven years, this has compounded: the bundle gets bigger, more brands take part, more communities are pulled in, and Hope's own social audience grows on the back of each year's activity.

What this case does not prove is that "many small prizes always beat one big prize." It proves only that a bundle of 100+ donated prizes worked here, at this scale, for this audience, in year seven of the series. There is no controlled comparison with a single-jackpot variant of the same draw.

Audience: seven years of warm relationship, not a cold acquisition

Hope Blamire has, at point of writing, around 85,000 followers on Facebook and roughly 11,000 on Instagram. Her own copy describes a "fanbase of over 50,000." Those are the channels through which the draw is mostly promoted. The platform itself is Crowdfunder, but the traffic into the platform is largely Hope's own.

The size of that audience is the result of a long, slow build: a graduate of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in 1998, qualified as an art teacher, taught internationally, returned to paint full time, with a studio near Bath and a physical gallery on the Isle of Harris. The Hebridean ties are real and run deep. Her paintings of west-coast Scottish seascapes are sold to private collectors in the UK and internationally. By 2023, her audience had been receiving (and engaging with) Scottish-island content for over a decade, and the annual Christmas draw for seven years. The £138,514 is what the seventh annual ask produces from a warm, primed audience of tens of thousands.

The shape of the seven-year curve makes this point cleanly. Years 1 to 3 raised £11k, £14.3k and £17k respectively, while the audience was still being built and the draw was still finding its form. Year 4 (2020) jumped to £132k. Whatever the precise contributors to that jump (one plausible factor is the unusual giving environment of the first Covid year; another is that the prize bundle and the audience had both reached a critical mass), the curve from £17k to £132k in twelve months is the curve of a model that has just compounded across an audience large enough to amplify it. From 2020 onwards, the draw sits in a £120k to £140k band: a plateau, not a runaway.

Marketing and cadence: the un-fancy bits that matter

The marketing here is structurally simple, and that is the point.

  • Annual cadence. The draw runs in the same window every December, drawn live on Facebook in mid-December. Supporters know it is coming and plan for it. The series has reached the point where Hope and her followers refer to it as "the annual" rather than "this year's." That predictability is its own marketing.
  • Owned channels. Promotion runs through Hope's own social accounts (Facebook ~85k, Instagram ~11k) and the artist's own website and email list. No paid acquisition is recorded in the sources reviewed; the draw appears to rely entirely on owned and earned reach.
  • Multi-cause network effect. Each year's four-cause slate brings in the activated networks of four separate charities and their supporter bases. This is part of the spike: it is not only Hope's audience showing up, it is the supporter communities of each of the four causes too.
  • Live draw event. The winners are drawn live on Facebook on a fixed evening. The event itself is a piece of content that draws in viewers and acts as a hard deadline for last-minute ticket buyers in the closing days.
  • Earned media. Local Scottish press (welovestornoway.com, Press and Journal, Evening Express) covers each year's draw and beneficiaries. Crowdfunder's own editorial team gave the 2023 draw top-of-Top-100 framing in their "4 Perfect Prize Draws" Stories piece, which itself generated further reach.

None of these channels are novel and none cost much money. The lever doing the work is the relationship with the audience, not the channel mix.

Economics, on the back of an envelope

The gross raise of £138,514 across 7,958 supporters works out to roughly £17.40 per supporter on average. With a £2 ticket, that implies an average of about 8 to 9 tickets per supporter. Treating all paid pledges as £2 tickets, the implied paid-route entries are roughly 69,000, against a prize pool of 100+ prizes, giving rough realised odds of around 1 in 700 of winning some prize. These are inferences from the published headline figures; the platform's exact ticket count for the 2023 draw is not available because the Crowdfunder leaf page returns 403 to automated requests.

Treating the gross as an equal four-way split would give each of the four charities approximately £34,628 before Crowdfunder's platform fees and payment processing come off the top. Crowdfunder's published fee structure for charity-style projects typically waives the platform fee and charges payment processing via the standard payment provider (about 2.4% plus 20p per transaction). On 7,958 transactions that order of magnitude would plausibly take in the region of £4,000 to £5,000 off the gross before distribution, although this is an estimate from public fee policy, not a verified figure for this specific campaign.

What this means in practice: each charity probably received in the region of low £30,000s, not the headline £138,514. For each of the four causes, that is a meaningful but not transformative amount, and the case is best read with that in mind. Hope's draw is a five-figure-per-cause result, not a six-figure-per-cause result, and it should be discussed in those terms.

What charity teams should take from this

  1. Cadence beats novelty. Build a known annual moment, then ride the same hill every year. Hope's curve, from £1.5k in 2016 to a £120k to £140k plateau from 2020 onwards, is the curve of a model that gets a small annual ask in front of a steadily growing warm audience. Almost any charity, social enterprise or membership body has some yearly moment it can attach a prize draw to: an anniversary, a service day, a seasonal pause in the calendar. The lever is repetition with a date supporters can put in their diary, not invention.

  2. Source the prize bundle from your network, not your budget. The sourcing is the marketing. Over 100 donated prizes meant the prize cost to the charities was effectively zero, and meant every prize donor had a reason to share the draw with their own followers. Charities with corporate-supporter relationships, member networks, or local business ties can build this kind of bundle without spending. The sourcing exercise is itself the audience-building exercise: the more donors you persuade in, the larger the cumulative reach behind the campaign.

  3. A multi-cause split multiplies activated audiences, but expect a smaller per-cause cheque. Naming four registered charities did not just spread the risk; it pulled in the supporter networks of four separate causes around the same paid moment. That is mechanically how the spike works. The cost is that each charity receives roughly a quarter of the gross, minus fees. For a small or medium charity, sharing the lead on a joint draw can be worth more than running its own; for a large charity already operating its own lottery, the maths is less obvious.

  4. Be honest with yourself about whether you have an "individual at the centre." If you do not, copy the mechanism but plan for a different ceiling. The un-transferable component here is Hope Blamire herself: a single recognisable person with seven years of personal Scottish-island content engaging an audience of tens of thousands. If your organisation has someone who can plausibly play that role (a founder, a long-serving figurehead, a beneficiary with a public profile), the mechanism above is genuinely available to you. If it does not, the same mechanism will still work, but the ceiling will sit lower, and a different archetype (a society lottery, a self-funder model, or a partnership with an individual who has the audience) is likely to fit better.

What this case study doesn't claim

The headline figure of £138,514 is the gross raise on Crowdfunder for the single 2023 Christmas draw. It is not the cumulative seven-year total, and it is not what any one of the four charities received. Each of the four charities received a share of that gross, after Crowdfunder fees and payment processing came off the top; on an equal four-way split the gross-of-fees share would be approximately £34,628 per charity. The split itself is treated here as equal four ways for 2023 (which is well supported by Hope's own framing and by the explicit equal split for the 2024 draw), but no primary 2023 source directly quotes the per-charity sum, and earlier draws in the series have used uneven splits. The "individual at the centre is the load-bearing component" thesis is a structural reading consistent with the seven-year build curve and the audience size, not a controlled experiment; the counterfactual of the same model run without a recognisable individual cannot be tested from this case alone.

Sources

All sources verified 2026-06-08.

Note on the Crowdfunder project page itself (https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/hope-blamire-christmas-charity-draw-2023): this leaf page returns HTTP 403 to standard automated requests, so its body text is not directly cited here. The figures on it are reproduced via the Crowdfunder Stories editorial and via independent local reporting, both of which are consistent with each other. This is a documented limitation of the source set, not a missing fact.

Questions this case answers

How much did Hope Blamire's 2023 Christmas charity draw raise?

The 2023 draw raised £138,514 in gross pledges on Crowdfunder over about 13 days from 7,958 supporters, according to Crowdfunder's editorial coverage and independent reporting in welovestornoway.com. This is the figure for the single 2023 draw, not a cumulative total. Across the wider seven-year series, Hope Blamire had raised about £400,000 by the end of 2023 and approximately half a million pounds by the end of 2024.

Who benefited from the 2023 draw, and how much did each charity receive?

Four registered charities benefited: Scotland's Charity Air Ambulance (OSCR SC041845), Calum's Cabin (OSCR SC038054), Eilidh's Trust, i.e. the Eilidh MacLeod Memorial Trust (Charity Commission 1180467), and Beautiful Inside & Out (SCIO) (OSCR SC044868). Hope's own draw page lists the four together. Treating the £138,514 gross as an equal four-way split gives roughly £34,628 per charity before Crowdfunder fees and payment processing come off the top. The 2024 draw was explicitly an equal four-way split, but earlier draws in the series have used uneven splits, so the equal assumption for 2023 is well supported but not directly quoted in a primary 2023 source.

Is this a free-entry prize draw?

No. It is a paid-entry prize draw. Tickets cost £2 each on Crowdfunder. A free postal entry route is offered because UK law and Crowdfunder's own platform rules require it under the Gambling Act 2005, so the draw stays legal without a lottery operating licence. The free route is compliance plumbing, not the main entry route.

Was this Crowdfunder's number one project of 2023?

Crowdfunder's editorial coverage in its 'Stories' section places the project firmly in its Crowdfunder Top 100 for 2023, and indexed copies of that editorial describe it as the top prize draw of the year on the platform. Crowdfunder itself promoted the project under that framing. The Top 100 list is Crowdfunder's own ranking and is not externally audited.

How did the prize bundle work?

Over 100 prizes were assembled for the 2023 draw across artwork, jewellery, vouchers, learning courses, home decor and holidays across the Hebrides and the mainland. Prizes were donated to the draw. Hope's draw page actively invites brand and individual donors to email her with prize offers. Donated prizes mean the cost of the prize bundle to the charities is effectively zero, so gross pledges flow through to the four causes minus only platform fees and payment processing.

Is this transferable to a charity without a charismatic individual at the centre?

Partly. The three components that are cleanly transferable are the annual cadence (a known yearly moment supporters anticipate), the donated prize bundle (low prize cost, broad spread of sources), and the multi-cause split (which activates several supporter communities at once). The component that is not transferable is a single named individual with an existing warm audience of tens of thousands built over years. If your organisation does not have someone who can play that role, copy the mechanism but expect a different ceiling, and consider a different model entirely (for example, one where the organisation itself is the recognised brand).