Patchwork: £277,393 across 33 prize draws on Crowdfunder, compiled from the individual campaign pages

Most paid entry prize draws are built as events: one campaign, one push, one number. Patchwork built the opposite. Between September 2022 and November 2025, Patchwork The Store ran 33 separate prize draws on Crowdfunder, close to one a month, each a standalone campaign of about four weeks with its own page, its own prize bundle and its own close date. Compiled across the individual campaign pages by The Prize Draw Company, the programme totals £277,393 from 35,936 supporters counted draw by draw (the sum of each campaign page's supporter count, so a repeat entrant is counted once per draw entered), and it is still running.

No single public source states that total, and that fact is itself part of the story. Patchwork has never badged this as a capital appeal or pushed a cumulative figure; each month's draw is simply the next one. The aggregate only becomes visible when someone sits down with all 33 pages, which is what we did. What the pages show, read in sequence, is the strongest evidence we have found that a prize draw can behave like a revenue line rather than a fundraising event: per-draw income roughly doubled over three years, supporter numbers per draw held between 800 and 1,600 through the mature phase, and the format barely changed.

The organisation behind it is not a household-name charity. It is a community interest company in Torbay with a shop attached and a founder, Rachaele Hambleton, whose Part-Time Working Mummy platform reaches nearly 800,000 people across her accounts. Both halves of that sentence matter, and this case study takes them in turn: first what the programme proves about repetition, then what it owes to the audience that was there before the first draw launched.

At a glance

• Programme total: £277,393 across 33 prize draws from 35,936 supporters, September 2022 to November 2025 and ongoing. The supporter figure is the sum of the per-draw supporter counts across the 33 draws, so repeat entrants are counted once per draw entered, not unique individuals. Compiled by The Prize Draw Company from the individual Crowdfunder campaign pages; no single public source states the total.
• Beneficiary: The Patchwork House Women's Centre CIC, company number 13024604, incorporated 16 November 2020. A community interest company, not a registered charity. Runs women's centres in Torbay: safe spaces, counselling and trauma support, the Freedom Programme, a community pantry and a free shop.
• Operator: Patchwork The Store, the retail arm opened in Paignton in May 2022 to fund the centre. The draws run as separate campaigns under its Crowdfunder profile; the legal promoter named in the draw terms and conditions is the CIC itself.
• Audience engine: founder Rachaele Hambleton's Part-Time Working Mummy platform, reaching nearly 800,000 people across Facebook, Instagram and Patreon, plus Patchwork's own channels. Draws mobilise 800 to 1,600 supporters each.
• Mechanic: paid entry prize draw on Crowdfunder, entries £2 to £5 with bundle discounts, free postal route as the Gambling Act 2005 compliance requirement. Average spend roughly £7.70 per supporter per draw, implying bundles.
• Cadence: each draw runs about four weeks. 33 draws in 39 months: three in 2022, eleven in 2023, twelve in 2024, seven in 2025.
• Trajectory: per the campaign pages, draws in 2022 and early 2023 mostly raised £2,000 to £6,000; from late 2023 through 2024, typically £8,000 to £12,000; every 2025 draw cleared £9,500, topped by The Patchwork Advent 2.0 at £12,963.
• Prizes: a rotating procured mix. Cash and gift cards in nearly every draw, beauty and wellness (Dyson hair tools, LED masks, beauty advent calendars), home and tech (Ninja air fryers, Shark vacuums, gaming consoles), two-night lodge stays and hotel breaks, and limited-edition items such as Marc Jacobs bags and Omega x Swatch watches.

Who Patchwork actually is

Three entities sit behind the word Patchwork, and untangling them is necessary before the numbers mean anything.

The Patchwork House Women's Centre CIC is the beneficiary. Hambleton, a survivor of domestic abuse who spent her teens in the care system, opened it in Torbay in 2021 as what Patchwork describes as the area's first women's centre. It is a community interest company limited by guarantee: a business with a statutory asset lock, regulated through Companies House rather than the Charity Commission. That structure has practical consequences for fundraising. There is no Gift Aid on donations, no charity number to put on a poster, and Crowdfunder lists its draws under community and social enterprise categories rather than charity ones. A CIC running a paid entry prize draw is entirely lawful; it just cannot borrow the trust shortcuts a registered charity gets for free, which makes the transparency of its campaign pages do more work.

Patchwork The Store is the operator. Hambleton opened the bricks and mortar shop in Paignton in May 2022 explicitly as a commercial entity to fund the centre, with profits going back into the CIC, and the store's own site identifies itself in its footer by the CIC's company number. The Crowdfunder profile that hosts all 33 draws belongs to the store, which is why the campaign trail begins with an online launch draw celebrating the shop opening. The legal promoter named in the draw terms and conditions, though, is the CIC itself; the store is the public face and the operator of the profile.

Rachaele Hambleton's personal platform is the audience. Part-Time Working Mummy is one of the larger parenting communities online: a four-times Sunday Times bestselling author with, by Patchwork's own description, nearly 800,000 people across her accounts. When a draw opens, it is announced to that following, not to a cold market. The 800 to 1,600 supporters who enter each month are a conversion of an existing parasocial audience, and the case has to be read with that in view.

What the programme is

Each draw is a separate Crowdfunder campaign running about four weeks. Entries cost £2 to £5 with discounted bundles for multiple entries, and the average spend of roughly £7.70 per supporter per draw across the programme says the bundle, not the single ticket, is the typical purchase. A free postal entry route sits alongside the paid one because that is the condition that keeps a paid entry draw outside the lottery licensing regime of the Gambling Act 2005. The free route is compliance plumbing. The product is paid entries, and every part of the page, the prize photography and the social promotion is built to sell them.

The prizes rotate but the format does not. Cash or gift cards anchor nearly every draw. Around that anchor sits a themed bundle: beauty advent calendars in the autumn, garden and gadget bundles in summer, lodge stays, air fryers, consoles, the occasional limited-edition item. The pages carry the same cause storytelling each time, explaining what the centre does and where the money goes. Titles follow the calendar: January Re-Set, Hello Spring, Father's Day, Summer Cash and Gifts, Beauty Advent, The Patchwork Advent 2.0. A supporter who entered in March knows exactly what April will look like.

That standardisation is the design choice that makes 33 draws operationally possible for a small organisation. There is no reinvention between draws: the same entry mechanics, the same page structure, the same monthly marketing rhythm to the founder's audience. The marginal cost of draw number 33 is the prize procurement and a few weeks of social posts.

What three years of pages show

Read in sequence, the campaign pages describe a programme that grew rather than decayed. The first three draws in autumn 2022 raised £5,872, £2,788 and £4,674. Through early 2023 the draws sat mostly between £2,000 and £6,000. From the autumn of 2023 something shifts: an £8,309 September draw, then £11,460 for a Dyson product draw, then £13,726 for the first advent calendar draw, and from that point the £8,000 to £12,000 band becomes the norm rather than the ceiling. Every draw in 2025 cleared £9,500, and the programme's three biggest results, the Advent Calendars draw of 2023, The Beauty Advent of October 2025 and The Patchwork Advent 2.0 of November 2025, are all Christmas-season draws in the £12,900 to £13,800 region.

Supporter counts tell the same story at a different angle. Early draws drew 300 to 900 entrants; the mature programme reliably mobilises 1,200 to 1,600. The audience did not tire of the format. It settled into it.

Two dips in the table are worth more attention than the peaks, because they mark the programme's real constraint. In spring 2024 Patchwork launched a second April draw three weeks after the March draw closed; it managed £5,209, roughly half the surrounding draws, before a relaunched version a month later recovered to £11,862. In November 2024 a Designer Advent draw opened eight days after the Beauty Advent closed at £11,450, and took £6,602. The pattern in both cases is the same: it is not month 33 that fatigues this audience, it is the second ask inside one window. Two data points cannot rule out prize mix as a confounder; designer goods may simply appeal less to this audience than beauty advent calendars, and the April draw's relaunch hints that something else may have gone wrong with it too. But spacing is the factor the two dips share. The monthly cadence is not just a habit-former; it is a spacing discipline, and the two times it was compressed, the results dropped immediately.

One more honest reading of the table: the cadence itself loosened in 2025, from twelve draws in 2024 to seven, spaced closer to six weeks apart than four. Per-draw revenue held up or improved, so this looks like a deliberate trade of frequency for freshness rather than decline, but it does mean "monthly" is a description of the programme's character, not a strict timetable, and the annualised income from the channel will have been somewhat lower in 2025 than a naive draws-times-average calculation suggests.

The flywheel, and who it belongs to

The thesis this case is usually reached for is the monthly flywheel: repeat a standardised draw on a fixed rhythm and the repetition itself becomes the asset, because supporters form a habit, trust compounds with every transparently run draw and the income line becomes predictable enough to budget against. Patchwork is the best evidence for that thesis we have found on Crowdfunder. A quarter of a million pounds, built £2 and £5 at a time, with revenue per draw roughly doubling while the format stood still, is not what audience fatigue looks like.

But the flywheel did not start itself, and the honest version of the lesson has to say so. Hambleton's following predates the first draw by years; the centre itself was opened on the back of that platform, and the store and its draws were built to monetise attention that already existed. The entrants behind those 35,936 per-draw supporter counts were not acquired by the draws. They were converted by them, some of them presumably many times over. A small organisation without a founder-scale audience that copies the format should expect the mechanics to work and the absolute numbers to be far smaller, in proportion to the warm audience it can actually reach each month.

So the transferable claim is narrower than "any small organisation can build this with consistency", and more useful: consistency converts an existing audience better than events do. Whatever warm audience an organisation has, a standardised, fairly run, well spaced draw programme will convert it month after month without exhausting it, and the conversion improves with repetition as trust accrues. The size of the engine is set by the audience. The durability of the engine is set by the cadence. Patchwork demonstrates the second; the first it inherited.

What small organisations should take from this

1. Build the programme, not the campaign. Patchwork's unit of design is not a draw, it is a repeatable month: standardised page, standardised entry pricing, rotating themed prize bundle, fixed marketing rhythm. That is what lets a CIC with a shop run 33 campaigns without a fundraising team. If you are weighing a prize draw, the higher-value question is not "what would our draw look like" but "what would our twelfth draw look like", because the compounding shown in this table only arrives if the format survives repetition.

2. Space is the fatigue control. The two weak results in three years were both second draws compressed into another draw's window, and both were followed by immediate recovery once normal spacing resumed. The audience's tolerance is one ask per window, asked well. Before adding an extra draw for a good reason (a bonus advent, an anniversary), treat the spacing as the thing being spent.

3. Let the calendar pick the prizes. Patchwork's biggest draws are all seasonal: advent calendars and Christmas bundles at the top, themed spring and summer draws behind them. The rotating mix of cash plus relatable-but-aspirational consumer prizes (a Dyson, a lodge weekend, a beauty calendar) keeps a familiar format feeling new without redesigning anything. A programme needs a prize engine, and the retail calendar is a free one.

4. A CIC can run this, and transparency is its substitute for a charity number. Nothing in the mechanic requires charitable status. What the structure does demand is that the cause case be made on the page every time, because a CIC cannot lean on the Charity Commission register for borrowed trust. Patchwork's pages explain, draw after draw, what the centre does and where the money lands, and the three-year supporter retention suggests that did the job.

What this case study doesn't claim

The £277,393 / 33 draws / 35,936 supporters headline is The Prize Draw Company's own compilation from the individual Crowdfunder campaign pages; no public source states the aggregate and Patchwork itself has not published one. The supporter figure is the sum of the 33 campaign pages' individual supporter counts, so a repeat entrant is counted once per draw entered; the number of unique individuals behind it is unknown and, given that the programme's whole thesis is the same audience returning month after month, plausibly much smaller. Per-draw figures quoted here are point-in-time reads of those pages, and because pages were read at different times the per-draw ledger sums to £283,629 and 34,884 supporters against the compiled headline of £277,393 and 35,936, a gap of roughly 2 to 3 per cent running in opposite directions on the two measures; the derived averages in this case (about £8,406 per draw, about 1,089 supporters per draw, about £7.70 per supporter per draw) are computed from the headline aggregate. We do not claim the programme's absolute numbers transfer to an organisation without a comparable warm audience; the founder's platform predates the programme and is doing the acquisition work throughout. We do not claim a precise audience-to-entrant conversion rate, because the reachable share of a cross-platform following of nearly 800,000 is not knowable from outside. And we make no claim about Patchwork's costs, margins or the share of the centre's running costs the draws cover; no accounts-level breakdown of the draw income is public.

Sources

Verified 2026-06-12. The Crowdfunder leaf pages are Cloudflare protected against automated fetching; figures from them are page reads compiled by The Prize Draw Company.

• Crowdfunder campaign pages under the Patchwork The Store profile, including crowdfunder.co.uk/p/the-patchwork-advent-20-prize-draw, crowdfunder.co.uk/p/beauty-advent-calendar-prize-draw, crowdfunder.co.uk/p/patchwork-prize-draw-christmas-2022, crowdfunder.co.uk/p/the-patchwork-autumn-prize-draw and crowdfunder.co.uk/p/patchwork-the-store-launch-draw. Primary source for all per-draw amounts, supporter counts, entry pricing and prize descriptions; compiled page by page by The Prize Draw Company.
• Companies House, register entry for The Patchwork House Women's Centre C.I.C., company 13024604, at find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/13024604. Source for the CIC structure, incorporation date (16 November 2020), company type (limited by guarantee, community interest company) and active status. Reliability High.
• Patchwork The Store, "About Us" and "About our Founder" pages, at patchworkthestore.co.uk. Source for the store's May 2022 Paignton opening, the store-funds-the-centre relationship, the centre's services (safe spaces, Freedom Programme, community fridge and pantry, free shop), the 2021 opening of the women's centre and its description as the area's first, and the "nearly 800k people across her multiple accounts" platform figure. The first-women's-centre and platform figures are Patchwork's own descriptions, not independently audited.
• Waterstones author page for Rachaele Hambleton, at waterstones.com/author/rachaele-hambleton/3920779, and Bell Lomax Moreton agency listing, at belllomaxmoreton.co.uk/fiction/rachaele-hambleton. Source for the Sunday Times bestselling author description (the agency listing states four times over).
• Patchwork The Store, "Prize Draw Terms & Conditions" page, at patchworkthestore.co.uk/pages/patchwork-the-store-launch-draw. Source for the draw terms framing, the CIC being named as the legal promoter of the draws, and proceeds returning to the CIC.
• Crowdfunder UK Help Centre, "Prize Draws", at help.crowdfunder.co.uk/en/articles/5367006-prize-draws. Source for the platform's prize draw product and the role of the free entry route under the Gambling Act 2005.