Inside the first UK Omaze house draw: £250,000 to Teenage Cancer Trust on a £1m Cheshire house (2020)

In November 2020, Ian Garrick, a civil servant from Mablethorpe, paid £10 for 15 entries and won a house in Cheadle Hulme worth around £1 million. Teenage Cancer Trust received a cheque for £250,000, the figure Omaze announced at the close of the draw and UK Fundraising reported at the time.

For a charity board weighing up a prize draw, those two numbers are the whole shape of the question. The £1 million was the value of the prize, not the donation. The £250,000 was the donation, not the gross ticket revenue. The gap between those two figures, plus the rest of what entrants paid in total, stayed inside a commercial operation, covering the house, the Tesla and MINI Cooper S Electric runner-up prizes, the national marketing, the platform and Omaze's 20% margin on net.

This was the first Omaze Million Pound House Draw ever held in the UK. It was the proof of concept that launched everything that followed. The point of revisiting it now is exactly that: to see, on the inaugural draw, what a commercial house draw actually delivers to a charity, and what it does not.

At a glance

• Subject: Omaze Million Pound House Draw, Cheshire (2020), the inaugural UK Omaze house draw
• Beneficiary: Teenage Cancer Trust (registered charity 1062559 in England and Wales; SC039757 in Scotland)
• Operator: Omaze UK (a for-profit company, not a charity)
• Prize: a house in Cheadle Hulme, Cheshire, with a stated value of around £1 million, including a hot tub and the first year of running costs covered
• Runner-up prizes: 2,000 of them, including a Tesla Model 3 Long Range, a MINI Cooper S Electric and a £10,000 Home Tech Hamper
• Entry price: paid online entry bundles starting from £10 (the winning entrant paid £10 for 15 entries); free postal entry route available
• Mechanic: paid-entry prize draw with a free entry alternative
• Campaign window: partnership announced 15 April 2020; entries closed midnight on Thursday 12 November 2020
• Winner: Ian Garrick, 56, civil servant from Mablethorpe, Lincolnshire
• Donation to Teenage Cancer Trust from this draw: £250,000 (Omaze's announced figure, independently reported by UK Fundraising)
• Upfront launch donation: £70,000 paid with immediate effect at the start of the campaign
• Multi-year commitment: minimum £1,000,000 to Teenage Cancer Trust over three years from UK Omaze donations
• Gross ticket revenue from this draw: not publicly disclosed
• Ambassadors: Vicky McClure and Ricky Wilson
• Archetype: commercial house draw (contrast case)

What the draw was

The product was a paid-entry prize draw with a free postal entry alternative. Online entry bundles started at £10. The headline prize was a single Cheshire house. The structure also carried 2,000 runner-up prizes, with a Tesla Model 3 Long Range, a MINI Cooper S Electric and a £10,000 Home Tech Hamper on the top of that list. The campaign was fronted by Vicky McClure and Ricky Wilson and ran as a national consumer campaign from spring 2020 to its close on 12 November 2020.

It is worth saying twice: this was paid entry. The free postal route was compliance plumbing, not the proposition. Entrants who wanted to influence their odds paid for bundles, and Omaze's revenue came almost entirely from those paid entries. Calling it a "free entry prize draw" gets the model the wrong way round and is one of the most common mistakes a charity makes when describing this archetype to its own board.

Teenage Cancer Trust was the beneficiary partner. It was not the promoter of the draw and it did not run the campaign. Omaze ran the campaign, owned the platform, owned the data list of entrants and held the legal responsibility for the prize draw.

How the model works (economics)

This is the section most worth understanding before any charity says yes or no to a partnership like this.

At the time of the 2020 Cheshire draw, Omaze UK's stated split was 80% of the net profit of a sweepstake to the charity partner, with Omaze keeping 20%. "Net" in this period meant gross ticket revenue after the cost of the prize (roughly £1 million for the house itself) and the cost of marketing and operations had been deducted. The charity's share was then calculated on what remained. Omaze's own launch press said it directly: "Eighty per cent of the draw profits will be going directly to Teenage Cancer Trust with a minimum donation of £70,000 being donated with immediate effect." Civil Society reported the same model: "80% of net proceeds go to its chosen charity partner with a minimum donation of £100,000 for a charity from each campaign."

In practice, on a £1 million house, that is a meaningful detail. The prize value comes off the top of gross sales before the 80/20 split. So does marketing. So do platform, fulfilment and operations. Whatever is left is the basis for the cheque. The publicly reported result for this draw is the cheque itself: £250,000 to Teenage Cancer Trust. That figure originates with Omaze's own announcement ("Our Cheshire House Draw raised an incredible £250,000 for our charity partner, Teenage Cancer Trust") and was independently reported by UK Fundraising. It is the operator's stated donation; no audited breakdown of the draw's accounts is public. The gross is not in the public record at all. Anyone telling you it was X without a source is guessing.

For the charity, this is structurally a guarantee plus a share. Teenage Cancer Trust received an immediate £70,000 on launch as a kick-start, was promised a minimum of £1 million over three years across UK Omaze draws, and got £250,000 from this draw at completion. In 2020, during a pandemic that had cut Teenage Cancer Trust's income by around a third (a shortfall of about £6 million a year, per the charity at launch as reported by UK Fundraising), the certainty of those numbers was the offer. The charity carried no financial risk on the campaign. Omaze did.

The same shape, viewed from the charity's side, is also where the model's catch lives. The £250,000 was a fixed share of the surplus, not a share of every pound entrants paid. The donor list of paid entrants, which is the strategically valuable asset that a draw like this generates, belonged to Omaze. The brand association ran in one direction (Teenage Cancer Trust appeared alongside an Omaze campaign that lives on as an Omaze campaign). The next draw, the next house and the next charity were Omaze's decisions, not the charity's.

One important note for current readers: Omaze changed its UK donation model from the Somerset House draw in November 2023 onwards, moving to a guaranteed minimum of £1 million per draw plus 17% of ticket sales to the charity partner. That is not the model the Cheshire 2020 draw ran on. Do not retrofit it.

The regulatory and legal frame

The Cheshire draw was a paid-entry prize draw with a free postal entry route, run under the Gambling Act 2005 exemption that keeps such draws outside the definition of a lottery. Omaze is explicit about this on its own pages: "the Omaze Million Pound House Draw and Monthly Millionaire Cash Draw are not a charity raffle, house or cash raffle or house or cash lottery but a prize draw." Because of that legal classification, the draw did not need a Gambling Commission lottery operating licence. The free postal entry was the mechanism that kept the structure on the right side of that line.

The promoter of the draw, in the regulatory sense, was the commercial operator. Teenage Cancer Trust was the beneficiary, not the promoter. That distinction shapes the Fundraising Regulator and advertising rules that apply: the operator carries the consumer-protection and advertising obligations on the campaign, including the requirements around odds disclosure, the free entry route and the terms and conditions. A charity that fronts its own draw takes those obligations on directly. A charity that partners with an operator like Omaze does not.

This is one of the quieter trade-offs in the model. The charity gets a near-zero compliance lift on the consumer-facing campaign. It also gives up the ability to shape much of that consumer-facing campaign in detail.

What charity teams should take from this

1. Treat the headline gross and the charity donation as different numbers. In a commercial house draw, the cheque to the charity is calculated after the prize and the operator's marketing and operations have been paid out of gross ticket revenue, with the operator keeping a margin on what is left. For the Cheshire draw, the £250,000 donation is the verifiable charity figure; the gross is not in the public record. Never quote the prize value, the gross sales and the donation as if they are the same thing, in either direction. When you brief your board, label all three.

2. The trade is risk and effort for ownership and upside. Teenage Cancer Trust received £250,000 with no operational lift, no platform build, no marketing spend, no cash-flow exposure and no obligation if the draw underperformed. That is genuinely valuable, especially in a year like 2020. The charity also ended the campaign without a paid-entry donor list, without a platform it owns, without a brand IP it can re-use, and without the in-house capability to run a similar draw the following year. A self-run draw inverts that trade. Decide, explicitly, which side of the trade your charity needs more, and be honest that both options have a real cost.

3. A guaranteed minimum is a contract floor, not a partnership outcome. Omaze's £1 million three-year guarantee was a fixed floor of certainty, attached to commercial decisions Omaze controlled (which draws, which houses, which timing, which messaging). Floor income is genuinely useful, especially under pressure. It is also not the same thing as a strategic partnership in which the charity influences the campaign. The question to ask before signing is not "is the floor good enough" but "are we content for the floor to be the whole thing".

What this case study doesn't claim

• We do not know the gross ticket revenue from the Cheshire 2020 draw. No public source discloses it. We do not estimate it. We only know what reached the charity (£250,000) and what was guaranteed alongside it (a £70,000 kick-start, a £1 million three-year minimum across UK draws).
• We do not know the exact composition of "net" in Omaze's 80/20 split for this draw. The public framing is "after the cost of the prize and marketing", and on that we are confident. The unit economics behind it are not public.
• We are not making a normative claim that the model is good or bad for charities. The model traded risk and operational lift for a fixed share of surplus. Whether that trade is right depends on what your charity needs right now, what it owns already and what it is willing to invest to build. The point of this case is to make the trade visible, not to score it.

Sources

1. UK Fundraising, "First Omaze £1m house winner announced with £250k raised for Teenage Cancer Trust", 26 November 2020. Verified 8 June 2026. High reliability. https://fundraising.co.uk/2020/11/26/first-omaze-1m-house-winner-announced-with-250k-raised-for-teenage-cancer-trust/
2. Omaze UK news, "Meet our Grand Prize Winner" (Cheshire). Verified 12 June 2026. Primary source for the winner, the prize and the £250,000 figure ("Our Cheshire House Draw raised an incredible £250,000 for our charity partner, Teenage Cancer Trust"). Note this is the operator's own announcement. https://omaze.co.uk/blogs/news/cheshire-meet-our-grand-prize-winner
3. Omaze UK, "About Omaze". Verified 8 June 2026. Primary source for the legal classification as a prize draw and the no-purchase-necessary clause. https://omaze.co.uk/pages/about-omaze
4. Cheshire Independent, "Fundraisers' million-pound Cheshire house prize". Verified 8 June 2026. Carries the most specific detail on the prize, runner-up prizes, entry mechanic, the 80% to charity figure and the £70,000 immediate donation. https://www.cheshireindependent.co.uk/news-article/4186/Fundraisers-million-pound-Cheshire-house-prize
5. Cardiff Times launch piece, syndicated from the Sifted launch coverage. Verified 8 June 2026. Carries the "20% of all the money donated" framing of Omaze's model at launch. https://www.cardiff-times.co.uk/us-superstar-fundraising-platform-omaze-launches-first-uk-campaign-to-support-teenage-cancer-trust/
6. Civil Society, "How prize draw firm Omaze raised £11.15m for charities in two years". Verified 8 June 2026. Cross-check on the 80% of net proceeds figure and the for-profit framing. https://www.civilsociety.co.uk/news/how-prize-draw-firm-omaze-raised-11-5m-for-charities-in-two-years.html
7. Wikipedia, "Omaze". Verified 8 June 2026. Useful only as a cross-check on the model evolution from 80% of net (pre November 2023) to 17% of ticket sales (post November 2023). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omaze
8. Teenage Cancer Trust on X, 15 April 2020. Verified 8 June 2026. Primary source for the inaugural-UK-draw framing. https://x.com/teenagecancer/status/1250387379879370753
9. Charity Commission for England and Wales, Teenage Cancer Trust (1062559). Verified 8 June 2026. Primary source for charity registration. https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/charity-details/?regId=1062559&subId=0