How Record Store Day x War Child raises around £42,000 a year without buying any of the inputs

Record Store Day UK and War Child have been running the same fundraising play, almost unchanged, for five years. Each April, Rega Research donates a small number of its Planar 3 turntables. A handful of artists sign them. Crowdfunder hosts a £5-a-ticket prize draw for each one. The free-entry postcard route keeps the whole thing legal without a lottery licence. The 2024 round raised £42,000 and the running total since the partnership began in 2020 has passed £120,000, both figures as reported by Record Store Day UK and War Child in their joint partnership announcement.

The interesting thing about the case is not the headline number. It is that almost none of the inputs cost War Child anything. The prize is donated. The platform fee is waived. The artists sign for free. The cultural moment, the press cycle and the audience of vinyl buyers are all assembled every year by Record Store Day, not by War Child. The charity supplies the cause and the postcard address, and most of what comes in clears as margin. That is what makes this worth studying.

The 2024 round is also the first one where the model visibly stepped up. Across the first four years of the partnership the cumulative total reached around £78,000, an average of roughly £19,500 per year (inference; sources publish only the cumulative figure and the 2024 figure). The 2024 run alone added £42,000, roughly double that average. The variable that changed was not the prize and not the price. Kate Bush was named RSD UK 2024 ambassador, and her signed Planar 3 was bundled with a test pressing of her exclusive RSD release, Eat the Music. That is correlation, not proof, but it is the part of the case worth pressure-testing if you are trying to copy the model.

At a glance

• Raised in 2024: £42,000 as reported by Record Store Day UK and War Child (partnership total, all 2024 RSD x War Child streams)
• Raised across the partnership 2020 to 2024: over £120,000, as reported by Record Store Day UK and War Child
• Ticket price: £5 per entry, no cap on entries, free-entry postcard route available
• Eligibility: UK only, 18+
• Prize in 2024: three one-off Rega Planar 3 turntables, signed respectively by Kate Bush, Blur and Young Fathers; the Kate Bush deck bundled with an exclusive test pressing of her RSD 2024 release Eat the Music
• Prize donor: Rega Research (donates turntables annually)
• Platform: Crowdfunder (per-artist project pages) and shop.warchild.org.uk; Crowdfunder waives platform fee for charities, processing charged at 1.9% + 20p + VAT per pledge
• Operator of RSD UK: Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA)
• Sale window 2024: entries open 11 April, winners announced 5 May
• Beneficiary: War Child, registered charity 1071659, total income £13.09m to 31 December 2024 per the Charity Commission register
• Mechanic: paid-entry prize draw with free postal alternative (no Gambling Commission licence required)
• Winner: not publicly disclosed

What the draw was

This is a paid-entry prize draw, structured so that a genuinely free postcard route exists alongside the £5 paid entries. That detail matters because it is what keeps the campaign out of the society-lottery regime. War Child does not have to register the draw with the Gambling Commission, file annual lottery returns or pay the External Lottery Manager fees a registered lottery would attract. The structure of the offer is the same as a raffle but the legal classification is lighter.

Each artist's turntable was a separate Crowdfunder project, so the three 2024 draws ran in parallel, with three winners drawn on the same announcement date. A fan could enter all three, or stack entries on whichever they wanted most. There was no tiered prize and no consolation pool. The structure is deliberately simple: one prize per page, £5 a ticket, unlimited entries, postcard free route, draw closes, winner contacted.

Prize

The prize is a Rega Planar 3 turntable, handmade in the UK, with the precision Rega RB330 tonearm, Rega Elys2 cartridge and a 24v motor, signed by the artist. In 2022 the prize was the Planar 1 RSD 15th-anniversary edition, signed by Sam Fender. In 2023 there were three Planar 3 decks, signed by Foals, Kae Tempest and Frank Turner. In 2024 there were three again, signed by Kate Bush, Blur and Young Fathers, with Kate Bush's deck uniquely bundled with a test pressing of her RSD release.

A new Rega Planar 3 retails for a few hundred pounds (the Rega Planar 1 RSD 15th-anniversary edition signed by Sam Fender in 2022 retailed at £299, as reported by music and hi-fi press at launch; the Planar 3 sits above that in the range). By the standards of charity prize draws, where the prize is often a property or a holiday or a once-in-a-lifetime experience, this is a small object with a niche audience. That is the point. Vinyl collectors and audiophiles know what a Planar 3 is, know it is a serious deck, and know that a one-off signed version of one does not exist anywhere else. Fit, not value, is what makes it a fundraising prize.

Rega Research donates the turntables. RSD UK has stated explicitly that "each year Rega Research generously donate Planar 3 turntables which are signed by artists and raffled from War Child's crowdfunding site." Rega has been the audio and turntable sponsor of RSD UK since around 2014 (their own communications referred to 2022 as their ninth year as sponsor), so the donation is not a one-off cultivation gift, it is a built-in feature of the partnership.

Audience

War Child does not have to assemble the audience for this draw. It rents one. Record Store Day UK runs through over 260 independent record shops every April. Vinyl-buying fans queue outside those shops from before dawn on the day. The artists themselves promote the special releases through their own channels. Music press (Music Week, NME, Line of Best Fit, Record of the Day) covers the announcement and the results. None of this is War Child's traffic. The charity plugs into a pre-assembled, high-engagement annual moment with a known audience.

Within that audience, the affinity is sharp. A vinyl collector who owns or wants a Planar 3 is the precise person who is willing to pay £5 for a one-in-many shot at a signed one. The same prize given to a general consumer audience would convert poorly. The 2024 step-change suggests that when the same audience is offered a prize tied to that year's ambassador, conversion lifts further, which is what you would expect.

Marketing

The marketing carry is shared. Record Store Day UK announces the fundraising activities through its own press cycle in March each year. The official RSD UK site, ERA's distribution, Rega's site, and the artists' own social channels all carry the launch. Music press picks it up. War Child itself runs a news item and then posts the result in May.

War Child does not appear to buy paid acquisition for this draw. The campaign does not need it. Two months a year, the music press is already talking about Record Store Day, and the turntable raffle slots into that conversation as a natural earned-media beat. This is the difference between a campaign you have to push and one that gets carried by a moment that exists anyway.

The 2024 round is the cleanest example of how ambassador alignment lifts the offer. Kate Bush as RSD UK ambassador put her face on the whole event. Her Eat the Music re-release was covered in mainstream press as well as music press. The signed turntable with the test pressing bundled in was a natural follow-up story. The 2024 raise of £42,000 is roughly double the average of the prior four years. We cannot prove the lift was caused by Kate Bush rather than by the maturing partnership, but the timing is suggestive enough that a fundraiser planning a copy of this model should treat ambassador or headline-artist alignment as the lever, not the prize or the price.

What charity teams should take from this

1. The repeatable shape is "annual slot in someone else's moment". The cheapest, most defensible charity prize draw is the one where you do not have to build the audience, the prize, the platform or the press cycle yourself. War Child's job inside RSD UK is to supply the cause, the postcard address and a Crowdfunder page. That is a far smaller lift than running your own draw from scratch. If you are choosing between launching a standalone draw and earning a fundraising slot inside a partner's recurring event, the second is structurally easier to defend to a board, and it compounds year on year while a standalone draw resets each time.

2. Prize-audience fit beats prize value. A hand-built audiophile turntable retailing for a few hundred pounds is a small prize by sector standards. It outperforms a generic mass-market prize for the only audience that matters here, because the fans buying tickets already know what a Planar 3 is. The fundraising principle is that the right prize for a small, warm audience is more efficient than a bigger prize for a cold one. If your charity has a sharp affinity audience (a sport, a genre, a region, a profession), test a prize that audience considers genuinely rare before reaching for something universal.

3. The headline raise is the receipt, not the product. A £42,000 line item is small for an organisation with £13m of income, so the case for repeating this draw is not the cash. It is that the partnership is now a permanent April fixture, the artists and the prize donor are returning each year, the operational lift is small, and almost every pound nets through. That is a compounding asset, not a one-off event. If you measure this kind of draw on first-year cash you will probably cut it; if you measure it on three-year compounding margin and on the brand exposure inside a known music-press moment, the case looks different.

What this case study doesn't claim

This case does not claim that the £42,000 raised in 2024 came from the signed-turntable raffles alone. The sources we found state the £42k as a partnership total covering the turntable raffles on Crowdfunder, the £1-per-unit donation pot from 13 special RSD vinyl releases, and the Studio by Miraval pop-up mystery-vinyl sales that were split with CALM. None of those streams is published separately, so we cannot attribute the £42k to any single mechanic. The same caveat applies to the cumulative £120k across five years.

We do not have a verified entrant count. Crowdfunder displays a backer count on each project page but the per-project URLs are Cloudflare-protected and were not retrieved. The most an entrant count can be is the upper bound derived from the gross: at £5 a ticket, £42,000 covers a maximum of 8,400 entries, but that figure double-counts because some of the £42k did not come from £5 turntable tickets.

We do not claim Kate Bush's ambassadorship caused the 2024 step-change. Correlation with the doubling of the prior-year average is suggestive, especially given the unique test-pressing bundle on her turntable, but the partnership was also four years old by then and the underlying compounding may explain a share of the lift. A reader trying to copy the model should treat ambassador alignment as a lever worth testing, not a proven multiplier.

We do not assert a year-by-year breakdown of the £120k cumulative. Only the 2024 figure is published; the 2020 to 2023 splits are not, and any apparent prior-year average is an arithmetic inference from the cumulative minus 2024.

We note that 2020, the first year of the RSD UK x War Child charity-partner status, appears to have been a vinyl-release fundraiser only, with no signed-turntable raffle found in the public record. The "five-year partnership" framing is therefore accurate for charity-partner status but should not be read as five years of signed-turntable draws.

We could not retrieve a direct quote from Rega Research. Their role as annual donor of the turntables is reported by Record Store Day UK and is consistent year-on-year across press coverage, but the wording attributed to Rega is not first-hand.

Sources

All sources verified 2026-06-03 unless otherwise noted. The central figures (£42,000 for 2024 and over £120,000 cumulative) were re-corroborated on 2026-06-12 against the Record Store Day UK announcement, Record of the Day, Music Week and War Child's own news page title.

• Record Store Day UK, "Record Store Day UK and War Child partnership raises over £120k to support children whose lives have been torn apart by war". Primary announcement of the cumulative £120k figure and the 2024 £42k figure, with quotes from Richard Clarke (War Child Records) and Megan Page (ERA). Reliable, primary party. URL: recordstoreday.co.uk
• Music Week, "Record Store Day 2024 delivers fundraising boost for War Child UK" (article 089896). Independent music-industry trade press echo of the RSD UK announcement, lists 2024 streams including the £1-per-unit vinyl donation and the Studio by Miraval pop-up. Reliable trade press.
• Record of the Day, "Record Store Day UK and War Child partnership raises over £120k…". Independent music-industry trade press, carries the same quotes and figures.
• The Line of Best Fit, "Kate Bush, Young Fathers and Blur sign one-off Rega x RSD turntables to raise money for War Child". Independent music press, confirms the 2024 artist list, ticket price and entry mechanic.
• shop.warchild.org.uk prize-draw pages for Kae Tempest, Foals, Frank Turner and Sam Fender. Primary party, confirms £5 ticket price, unlimited entries, UK 18+ eligibility, postcard free-entry route, and Planar 3 / Planar 1 specifications. The Kae Tempest page contains a date typo (close date listed as April 2022) which is resolved by cross-reference to the Foals and Frank Turner pages (2023).
• Crowdfunder.co.uk project pages for the Kate Bush, Young Fathers and Robert Plant draws. URLs visible in the public search index, page content was Cloudflare-protected and not retrieved. The Crowdfunder slug pattern is "/p/rsd--prize-draw" and "/robert-plant-signed-war-child".
• Crowdfunder Help Centre, "What are your fees?" and "I am a charity; how do I use Crowdfunder?". Primary platform documentation, sets out the 1.9% + 20p + VAT per-pledge processing fee and the platform-fee waiver for charities.
• Charity Commission, charity overview for War Child (1071659). Primary regulator, confirms the registered charity number, the latest published total income of £13,091,000 to 31 December 2024, total spending of £12,700,000, and 8 trustees.
• Audio Media International, "Rega & War Child UK launch prize draw to win Sam Fender-signed RSD2022 turntable". Independent industry press, confirms £5 ticket price and the 2022 prize details.
• The Ear, "Rega's Record Store Day bonanza". Independent audio-press piece, carries Rega's own statement that 2022 was "9th year as audio and turntable sponsors of RSDUK".
• Rega Research, "Win a Rega Planar 1 RSD22 edition signed by Sam Fender". Primary party, confirms turntable specification and the prize-draw partnership.
• Official Charts, "Kate Bush announced as Record Store Day 2024 ambassador" and Billboard, "Kate Bush Tapped as U.K.'s Record Store Day 2024 Ambassador". Independent press, confirm Kate Bush's ambassador role and contain her quote on the appointment.
• War Child news page at warchild.org.uk/news/rsd-x-war-child-partnership-raises-42k-2024 (URL supplied in the brief). Primary party, the page returned HTTP 403 to our fetcher, but its title ("RSD X War Child partnership raises £42k in 2024") resolves in the public search index, re-confirmed 2026-06-12, and its content is echoed almost verbatim by the RSD UK, Music Week and Record of the Day items, which we used in its place.
• MusicTech and What Hi-Fi launch coverage of the Rega Planar 1 RSD 15th-anniversary edition (2022). Independent music and hi-fi press, source for the £299 retail price of the Sam Fender-signed deck.