Ipswich Town Foundation: £75,700 across 13 prize draws on Crowdfunder, anchored to a once-a-year matchday

Most prize draw case studies are about the one big number. This one is about the opposite: a charity football foundation has run 13 prize draws on Crowdfunder since 2023 and raised £75,700 across them. None of the individual draws is large. The biggest, the 2023 match-worn shirts from a 6-0 win over Charlton, raised £17,867.85 from 1,316 supporters. The rest of the series sits behind that, smaller and quieter.

The interesting choice is not the prizes or the price; both are unremarkable. It is the structural decision to anchor a repeating draw to one badged annual matchday and to use squad-worn shirts the club already controls as the prize stock. That gives the Foundation a recurring fundraising rhythm without a recurring marketing problem and without a recurring prize-procurement problem. The trade-off, which the case does not hide, is that this is a modest revenue line in a £3 million charity. It works as part of a portfolio, not as a hero campaign.

At a glance

• Beneficiary: Ipswich Town Foundation, registered charity 1157518, the football club's charitable arm. FY ending 30 June 2025 income £3,095,777.
• Mechanic: Paid-entry prize draw on Crowdfunder. Tickets from £5; bulk bundles available; free postal route for legal compliance.
• Cumulative raise across the Crowdfunder series: £75,700 across 13 prize draws on the Foundation's Crowdfunder account (2023 to 2026). This is the series total, not a single draw.
• Foundation Fixture shirt draws (the owned-inventory core): Charlton 2023 £17,867.85 (1,316 supporters); Middlesbrough 2024 £13,515 (923); Wolves 2025 £8,550 (534); Millwall 2026 £13,600 across a match-worn draw (£3,495) and a warm-up draw (£10,105). Five draws, £53,533 combined.
• Representative single draw: 2023 match-worn shirts from the 6-0 win over Charlton at Portman Road on 15 April 2023. Raised £17,867.85 from 1,316 supporters. Sixteen signed shirts, "each signed on the front and back".
• Annual Foundation Fixture programme totals (different number, larger, bundles other revenue): £32,388.79 (2022/23 vs Charlton); over £55,000 (2023/24 vs Middlesbrough); over £50,000 (2024/25 vs Wolves); £54,464.99 (2025/26 vs Millwall, 1-1, 21 March 2026).
• Prize sourcing: 16 match-worn or warm-up shirts per draw, owned inventory from the squad's matchday kit. 2026 draw added bespoke pre-match warm-up shirts designed with Call Me Ted, funded by Town supporter Richard Buss.
• Channel: A named annual fundraising matchday, the Foundation Fixture, plus the club's owned channels (website, social), TWTD and local press coverage, and the matchday crowd itself.

What the draw is, and what it is not

The product on Crowdfunder is a paid-entry prize draw: a supporter pays from £5, gets one or more chances to win one of sixteen signed shirts, and the Foundation keeps the proceeds for its charitable work. A free postal entry route is offered alongside, because Gambling Act 2005 case law treats a payment for a chance to win as a lottery unless a genuinely free route exists. The free route is compliance plumbing, not the marketing pitch; entrants overwhelmingly pay.

That is worth saying clearly because it is widely muddled in trade write-ups. This is not a society lottery (the Foundation runs one of those separately, the £2 Matchday Lottery with £250 / £100 / £50 / £25 cash prizes at each home match). It is not an auction, although match-worn shirts from the same fixture are auctioned via MatchWornShirt as a parallel revenue line. It is a paid-entry prize draw on a charity crowdfunding platform.

The Foundation Fixture as the anchor

The single non-obvious design choice in the case is not the draw mechanic, which is generic, but where the Foundation chooses to run it. Every year since 2022/23 the club has badged one home match as "Foundation Fixture", a named matchday that pulls Foundation programmes into the stadium bowl: half-time pitch walks featuring participants from each programme, an enlarged Foundation presence in the FanZone, Foundation participants in the Fly the Flag, Matchday Experience, Coach Arrival and Player Departure experiences. The match itself becomes a Foundation showcase for ninety minutes plus build-up and aftermath.

The prize draws sit on top of that. The squad's match-worn shirts from the Foundation Fixture become the prize pool. The warm-up shirts the squad wear for that one match become a separate, scarcer pool. The Crowdfunder closes a fortnight after the final whistle, while the matchday and its coverage are still in supporters' feeds. Two press cycles, the announcement and the cumulative total in April, do most of the work the Foundation would otherwise have to buy with paid promotion.

That anchor is the case's real lesson. The Foundation is not running standalone prize draws and trying to drag attention to them. It is stapling its draws to attention it has already generated for another reason. The draw is downstream of the badged matchday, not a campaign in its own right.

The unit economics

Two things keep the per-draw economics tidy.

First, the prize cost is close to zero in cash terms. The Foundation is not buying sixteen signed shirts at retail; it is taking the shirts the squad has just worn and asking the players to sign them. The marginal cost is laundering and handling. That is the structural advantage of an owned-inventory prize in a paid-entry draw, and it is the only place in this case where the maths is genuinely better than a typical small-charity prize draw that has to procure or beg the prize.

Second, the audience is largely free. The Foundation is fishing in the club's existing supporter base: the club's existing fan audience that follows the club's channels, attends the matchday and reads the local press without prompting. There is no media buy. The Crowdfunder draws cumulatively raised £75,700 with prize cost and audience-acquisition cost both near zero, which puts the take rate after platform fees in territory most paid-entry draws cannot match.

The constraint, equally honest, is that you cannot scale this without breaking it. The pool of match-worn shirts in any one match is sixteen. Run more draws and you likely dilute the scarcity that appears to have driven the first one to £18,000. Run them off-Foundation-Fixture matches and you lose the badged attention. The model is built to be steady, not big.

The numbers in proportion

The figure is £75,700 across 13 draws since 2023. Spread over roughly three years of activity, that annualises to somewhere around £23,000 a year. Against the Foundation's £3,095,777 of total income in the year to 30 June 2025, the Crowdfunder draws are well under 1 per cent of annual charitable income. Two reactions to that are both correct.

The first is that under 1 per cent is not transformative. A reader who is asked "is this how my charity raises £500k a year?" should say no. This is a programme that funds a particular slice of work, runs reliably, and earns the warm-list cultivation that comes with 4,000-plus named supporters; it does not move the income statement on its own.

The second is that under 1 per cent at near-zero marginal cost, repeatable annually, with a useful supporter list as a by-product, is exactly the kind of fundraising line that makes a portfolio robust. The Foundation Fixture matchday total of over £50,000 most years is built from this draw plus a dozen other small pieces. The lesson is not that the draws are the engine; it is that they are one of the pieces, and they are cheap to keep running.

Who, in detail

The Foundation engages around 9,000 young people and vulnerable adults a week across more than 30 programmes (the precise programme count rises year on year in the source material: 29 in 2024/25, 30+ in 2025/26 news, 34 in the 2025/26 Foundation Fixture key info page). It has 10 trustees, 117 employees and the standard charitable objects of a club community trust: education and employability, health and wellbeing, sport and physical activity, community participation. None of that depends on the draws; the draws are one funding line among many. But the draws are what populate the Foundation's warm supporter list with consenting names from a fan base that is otherwise mostly anonymous to the charity.

What charity teams should take from this

1. If you have an owned attention asset, run repeating small draws on top of it; do not run them as standalone campaigns. The single hardest cost in a small charity prize draw is audience acquisition. The Foundation does not pay that cost because the matchday and the club's owned channels already deliver the audience. If your charity has an annual gala, a national awareness day, a stadium concert, a member AGM or a flagship event with its own press cycle, the prize draw belongs on top of it, not next to it.

2. Use prize inventory you already control; the unit economics depend on it. A retail-procured prize forces you to either pay for it (which eats the margin) or secure a donor (which is annual fundraising work in itself). Match-worn shirts cost the Foundation almost nothing because the club already owns the shirts and the players already wore them. The replicable principle is to identify low-marginal-cost inventory you have access to (signed books, backstage tours, named brick, founder time, a one-off recipe from your in-house chef), not to copy the specific prize.

3. A repeating small draw is a portfolio line, not a hero campaign; sell it to your board on that basis. Cumulative £75,700 across 13 draws over three years is a real number, but annualised it is still well under 1 per cent of the charity's income. The defensible pitch internally is not "this is how we raise the year's target" but "this is a reliable, low-cost line that recurs without staff burnout, gathers a usable warm list and is built to run for as long as we have prizes and a matchday to anchor it". Frame the board paper that way and the small headline stops being a problem.

Sources

• Charity Commission Register, Ipswich Town Foundation (1157518), charity overview and contact information. Verified 2026-06-08.
• Crowdfunder Stories, "4 Perfect Prize Draws To Inspire Your Fundraising Efforts": crowdfunder.co.uk/stories/4-perfect-prize-draws-to-inspire-your-fundraising-efforts. Features the Foundation's shirt draws as an example, and the Charlton draw at over £18k / 1,316 supporters.
• Crowdfunder draw pages (crowdfunder.co.uk/p/...), figures as displayed on each project page, July 2026. Source of the per-draw raises and supporter counts for the 13 draws, from Charlton 2023 through the 2026 Millwall Foundation Fixture and the wider-programme draws.
• itfcfoundation.co.uk, "FOUNDATION FIXTURE RAISES OVER £54,000", 9 April 2026. Source of the 2025/26 £54,464.99 total and the Millwall 21 March 2026 fixture.
• itfc.co.uk, "FOUNDATION FIXTURE RAISES OVER £50,000", 29 April 2025. Source of the 2024/25 total.
• itfc.co.uk, "FOUNDATION FIXTURE RAISES £55,000", 26 April 2024. Source of the 2023/24 headline figure.
• TWTD, "Foundation Fixture Raises £32,000", 16 June 2023. Source of the 2022/23 £32,388.79 total, the Crowdfunder portion £17,867.85, and the Charlton 6-0 result.
• itfc.co.uk news, Foundation Fixture details and weekly Foundation round-up, April-June 2023. Source for the 2023 Charlton draw mechanic and prize description.
• itfcfoundation.co.uk, "Foundation Fixture | Key Info" (2025/26 page). Source for £5 minimum entry, bulk bundles, free entry option, draw timetable, and "the Club's official charitable arm" framing.
• itfcfoundation.co.uk, "Foundation team up with Call Me Ted". Source for the 2026 warm-up shirt design partnership and Richard Buss funding.
• itfcfoundation.co.uk, "Matchday Lottery to raise money for Foundation". Source for the separate £2 Matchday Lottery (£250/£100/£50/£25), formerly "Grab a Grand".
• itfcfoundation.co.uk, "2024: Year in Review". Source for the 2023/24 Foundation Fixture opponent (Middlesbrough, 1-1).
• East Anglian Daily Times / SuffolkNews, Wolves Foundation Fixture announcement, 17 March 2025. Source for the 2024/25 Wolves match date (Saturday 5 April 2025, Portman Road).
• Fundraising Regulator, "Prize competitions and free draws". Source for the legal framing of the paid-entry prize draw plus free postal route.