Why the British Heart Foundation went back to Omaze three times: £4.6m from Bath, £7.6m across three draws

The British Heart Foundation has run an Omaze house draw three times. In 2021 it was a £3m house in Fulham, and the charity received £1 million. In 2023 it was a £3m townhouse in Islington, and the charity received £2 million. In February 2025, Omaze announced that its Bath House Draw, a six-bedroom country manor on the River Avon worth over £4 million, had raised £4.6 million for BHF. Across the three draws, the cumulative total is more than £7.6 million.

Read quickly, that looks like a partnership deepening: a charity and an operator getting better at this together, the cheque roughly doubling each time. That reading is the trap this case study exists to correct. The figure that grew is real, and BHF was right to bank it. But the thing that compounded across those three draws was Omaze's audience and marketing reach, not BHF's. BHF did not end the sequence with a bigger fundraising machine of its own. It ended it the same way it started each draw: needing to come back to Omaze to get the result again.

That is the useful lesson here, and it is why this case sits in the bank as a contrast and not a template. It is the clearest available answer to the question every fundraiser eventually asks, "why don't we just do an Omaze?" The honest answer is that you cannot buy the audience that makes it work, so the model worth copying is the opposite one: build and own a warm audience of your own.

At a glance

• Subject: Omaze Million Pound House Draw, Bath (2024/25), BHF's third Omaze draw
• Beneficiary: British Heart Foundation (registered charity 225971 in England and Wales; SC039426 in Scotland)
• Operator: Omaze (a commercial, for-profit company, not a charity)
• Prize: a six-bedroom country manor at Batheaston near Bath, on the banks of the River Avon, valued at over £4 million, given mortgage-free with stamp duty and legal fees covered, plus £250,000 in cash
• Entry: paid online entry; the winner paid £20 as part of an Omaze subscription; free postal entry route available
• Mechanic: paid-entry prize draw with a free entry alternative
• Winner: Paul Knight, 47, a bar manager from Reading
• Donation to BHF from this draw: £4.6 million (the charity receipt, not gross ticket revenue)
• Cumulative across all three BHF draws: more than £7.6 million (£1m in 2021, £2m in 2023, £4.6m in 2025)
• What the Bath funds support: hundreds of new local defibrillators, and powering The Circuit, the national defibrillator network, for two years
• Backed by: S Club, after the band lost member Paul Cattermole to an undiagnosed heart condition in 2023
• Announced: February 2025
• Archetype: commercial house draw (contrast case)

The three draws, side by side

The sequence is the story, so it is worth setting out plainly.

• 2021, Fulham. A four-storey, three-bedroom freehold worth £3 million. Won by Marilyn Pratt, 68, from Greater London. BHF received £1 million. The funds went to research into heart and circulatory diseases. This was the first time the two had worked together.
• 2023, Islington. A £3 million Victorian townhouse. Won by Kevin Johnson, 34, a construction site manager. BHF received £2 million, taking the two-draw total to £3 million. Again, the funds were framed around research.
• 2024/25, Bath. A six-bedroom manor at Batheaston near Bath, on the River Avon, worth over £4 million, plus £250,000 cash. Won by Paul Knight, 47, a bar manager from Reading, on a £20 subscription entry. BHF received £4.6 million, taking the cumulative total to more than £7.6 million. This time the funds were earmarked for defibrillators and The Circuit.

Dr Charmaine Griffiths, BHF's Chief Executive, said of the Bath draw:

Omaze has raised an astonishing £4.6 million with its Bath House Draw.

BHF has said the money will help fund hundreds of local defibrillators and power The Circuit, the national defibrillator network.

Two things in that sequence are easy to miss. The first is that the prize got bigger: from a £3m house to a £4m-plus house with a quarter of a million in cash on top. The second is that the donation model changed underneath it. The 2021 and 2023 draws ran under Omaze's old model (80% of net proceeds, after the prize and marketing had been taken off the top). The Bath draw ran under the model Omaze switched to in November 2023: 17% of gross ticket revenue, with a £1 million minimum guaranteed. So the clean-looking progression of £1m, £2m, £4.6m is not a like-for-like curve. It is three real cheques calculated two different ways, on three differently sized draws. The growth is genuine. It is not a controlled measure of a relationship improving.

What actually compounds

Here is the question worth sitting with. If a partnership is deepening across three draws, you would expect something to accumulate on both sides. On Omaze's side, plenty does: a larger subscriber base each year, a bigger paid-media spend, a sharper funnel, a back catalogue of winner stories that sell the next draw. The cumulative £7.6 million is, in large part, a read-out of Omaze's own flywheel getting bigger between 2021 and 2025.

On BHF's side, far less accumulates than the rising cheque suggests. At the end of each draw, the asset a fundraiser would most want to keep, the list of people who paid to enter, stays with Omaze. So does the platform, the brand campaign, the prize, and the operational capability to run a draw of that size. BHF receives the donation and the brand association, and then, to get the result again, it returns to the same operator. The relationship is real and it is rational. But the reason it has to be repeated is precisely that the value it generates is not transferred. A charity that could keep the audience would not need a third draw to reach those people. It would already have them.

This is the inversion at the heart of the case. In the draws this bank holds up as the model to copy, the whole point is that the charity owns the warm audience and the draw monetises a relationship the charity keeps. Here it is the other way round. The charity is renting access to an audience the operator owns, and the rent buys one campaign at a time. Coming back is not a sign the charity is building something. It is a sign the charity cannot, on its own, reach the people the cheque depends on.

None of that makes the decision wrong. For a charity the size of BHF, £4.6 million in a single campaign, with no cash-flow risk, no prize to buy and no platform to build, is a serious and defensible result. The point is not that BHF should have refused. The point is to be clear-eyed about what the repeat custom is, and is not, building.

How the model works, and which number is which

The most important discipline in any commercial house draw is keeping three numbers apart: the prize value, the gross ticket revenue, and the charity donation. They are not the same thing, and conflating them in either direction is the standard mistake.

For the Bath draw, the prize was a house valued at over £4 million plus £250,000 cash. The donation to BHF was £4.6 million. The gross ticket revenue, the total of everything entrants paid, is not disclosed by Omaze. Under the current model, the charity receives 17% of that gross, with a £1 million minimum guaranteed. A £4.6 million donation at 17% implies a gross in the region of £27 million, but that figure is an inference from the percentage, not a published number, and it should be treated as such. Out of the gross, Omaze pays for the house, the cash prizes, the Early Bird cars (a Bentley and a Range Rover featured in this draw), national marketing, the platform, fulfilment, customer service and its own profit. The £4.6 million is what reached the charity after Omaze's commercial model had run.

State it the way a board should hear it: £4.6 million is the charity receipt. It is not the gross, and Omaze keeps the larger share to cover the house, the marketing and its margin. That is what a commercial operator is. It is not a criticism of Omaze; it is the definition of the model.

The regulatory frame, briefly

Omaze runs a paid-entry prize draw with a free postal entry route. That structure sits outside the Gambling Act 2005 definition of a lottery, so it needs no Gambling Commission licence. It is worth saying plainly that this is a paid-entry product. People buy tickets, and the revenue comes from paid entries. The free postal route is the compliance mechanism that keeps the draw legal without a licence, nothing more, and calling the product a "free-entry prize draw" gets it the wrong way round.

The relevant context for a charity weighing this up is the charitable share. Licensed society lotteries must give at least 20% to good causes. Omaze's current 17% of gross sits below that benchmark. The DCMS Voluntary Code of Good Practice for Prize Draw Operators, which Omaze signed as a founding signatory, took effect on 20 May 2026; it requires transparency on charitable contributions but sets no minimum percentage. Separately, the Fundraising Regulator has proposed a phased minimum charitable contribution rising from 10% in 2026/27 to 20% by 2028/29. The direction of travel is toward more disclosure and gradual pressure on the share. That is fair, sourced background, not a verdict on Omaze, whose model is lawful and well documented.

What charity teams should take from this

Three lessons, framed as what to learn from the model rather than how to copy it.

1. Read a multi-draw relationship by what it builds, not just what it banks. A rising sequence of cheques (£1m, then £2m, then £4.6m) reads like a partnership maturing. Before you tell that story about your own operator relationship, ask what your charity actually owns at the end of each round. If the donor list, the platform and the audience leave with the operator every time, you are not building a fundraising asset, you are buying campaigns one at a time. That can be the right purchase. Just account for it honestly, and do not let the cumulative total flatter you into thinking you have built something you have to keep renting.

2. The compounding asset is the audience, so own the audience you can. The reason Omaze's draws grow is that Omaze's reach grows. You cannot acquire that engine, but you can apply its lesson in reverse. The fundraising you can compound is the warm audience you build and keep: supporters, members, past entrants, an email list that is yours. A self-run draw to that audience returns a far higher share of every pound and leaves you owning the relationships. It will not produce £4.6 million in one go. It will produce something you do not have to rent back next year.

3. Keep the prize, the gross and the donation as three separate numbers, every time. £4.6 million is the charity receipt from the Bath draw, not the gross and not the prize value. When you brief a board or write a partnership announcement, label all three and never imply the charity received the gross. This is the single discipline that keeps a commercial house draw honest in the telling, and it is the one most often dropped.

What this case study doesn't claim

• It does not claim BHF made the wrong call. Three large, low-risk donations totalling more than £7.6 million is a strong result for a charity of BHF's scale, and the decision to return is defensible each time.
• It does not claim the £1m, £2m, £4.6m progression is a clean like-for-like curve. The first two draws ran under Omaze's old 80%-of-net model and the third under the new 17%-of-gross model, on differently sized draws. The growth is real but is not a controlled measure of a relationship improving.
• It does not state the gross ticket revenue as fact. The roughly £27 million figure is an inference from the 17% share, not a disclosed number, and is flagged as such.

Sources

Verified 11 June 2026. Full structured evidence, with verbatim quotes and confidence grades, in factsheet.md.

1. BHF news, "Omaze donates an astonishing £4.6 million to BHF" (February 2025). Primary charity release. High reliability. https://www.bhf.org.uk/what-we-do/news-from-the-bhf/news-archive/2025/february/omaze-donates-over-4million-to-bhf
2. BHF, Omaze corporate partnership page (£4.6m; The Circuit funded two years; Griffiths quote). Primary. High. https://www.bhf.org.uk/how-you-can-help/corporate-partnerships/our-corporate-partners/omaze
3. Omaze, "Meet the Bath House Draw Winners" (winner, prize, £4.6m, third draw, £7.6m cumulative). Primary operator. High. https://omaze.co.uk/blogs/news/meet-the-bath-house-draw-winner
4. Third Sector, "Omaze draw raised £4.6m for the British Heart Foundation" (third draw; £7.6m cumulative; 2021 and 2023 prior draws). Trade press. High. https://www.thirdsector.co.uk/omaze-draw-raised-46m-british-heart-foundation/fundraising/article/1905429
5. Third Sector, "£1m from Omaze prize draw guaranteed for British Heart Foundation" (Bath launch guarantee). Trade press. High. https://www.thirdsector.co.uk/1m-omaze-prize-draw-guaranteed-british-heart-foundation/fundraising/article/1900264
6. BHF news, "House draw raises one million pounds for BHF research" (9 April 2021; Draw 1, Fulham, Marilyn Pratt). Primary. High. https://www.bhf.org.uk/what-we-do/news-from-the-bhf/news-archive/2021/april/house-draw-raises-one-million-pounds-for-bhf-research
7. Charity Today, "Omaze House Draw raises £2 million for the British Heart Foundation" (Draw 2, Islington, Kevin Johnson, 15 March 2023, "second time"). Trade press. High. https://www.charitytoday.co.uk/omaze-million-house-draw-has-raised-an-incredible-2-million-for-the-british-heart-foundation/
8. Charity Today, "Omaze campaign raised £4.6 million for British Heart Foundation". Trade press. High. https://www.charitytoday.co.uk/omaze-campaign-raised-4-6-million-for-british-heart-foundation-bhf/
9. Charity Times, Joe Lepper (17 November 2023), James Oakes on the model change to 17% of gross plus £1m minimum. Trade press. High.
10. Civil Society News (20 November 2025, DCMS Voluntary Code) and (17 March 2026, Fundraising Regulator phased-minimum proposal). Trade press. High.