Streets of London #ComeOnHome 2021: how a £5 ticket and 25 parallel artist draws raised nearly £80,000 for homelessness

In June 2021 a small London homelessness charity took its cancelled annual gala, replaced it with twenty-five parallel prize draws on Crowdfunder, and raised nearly £80,000 (the charity's own reported total) from a £5 ticket. The mechanic is more interesting than the headline. Streets of London did not run one big draw with a big jackpot. It ran a cluster of small draws, one per donating artist, all under the same hashtag, all open at the same time. Coldplay had their own draw. Mark Knopfler had his own draw. Will Young had his own draw. Twenty-five parallel asks, each tied to its own narrow fan-base, sharing one charity, one platform and one three-week window.

That is the structural choice worth pulling apart, because it does something a single jackpot draw does not. It lets the prize donor's own audience reach do the marketing work the charity itself could not do. A 21-volunteer charity with three trustees and no paid staff does not have a list big enough to launch a £5 ticket nationally. A Bastille social post does. By making each artist the owner of their own sub-draw, the charity turned twenty-five donors into twenty-five broadcasters, each one reaching a different audience the charity could never have bought.

The celebrity layer is not transferable. The structural layer is. The transferable lesson is that the prize donor's reach IS the distribution plan, even when the donor is not famous, and that twenty-five small asks each matched to a narrow audience can beat one big ask matched to no one.

At a glance

• Charity: Streets of London, London homelessness charity, registered charity 1155242.
• Charity scale: total income £482,220 in the year to 31 March 2025; 3 unpaid trustees; 21 volunteers; no paid staff. (Most recently published accounts; not the 2021 year.)
• Campaign: #ComeOnHome Prize Draw, hosted on Crowdfunder at crowdfunder.co.uk/comeonhome.
• Dates: 00:01 GMT Wednesday 2 June 2021 to 23:59 GMT Friday 25 June 2021. Twenty-four days.
• Ticket price: £5 per entry, paid on Crowdfunder. Free postal route available (postcard or envelope) as the standard UK compliance path.
• Total raised: "nearly £80,000" (Streets of London, self-reported on the events page; the same total is restated on Starscream Communications' case-study page, which corroborates but is not independent of the campaign).
• Supporters: over 4,500 ticket-buyers across the 25 parallel sub-draws (Streets of London, reported on the same events page).
• Average spend per supporter (derived): approximately £17.77, i.e. about three to four tickets per supporter on average.
• Geography: open worldwide.
• Contributing artists (25): Paul McCartney, Mark Knopfler, Eric Clapton, Coldplay, Jorja Smith, The 1975, Bastille, Rag'n'Bone Man, Liam Gallagher, Jessie Ware, James Blunt, Duran Duran, Foals, Craig David, Laura Marling, The Vaccines, Celeste, Hot Chip, The Chemical Brothers, Declan McKenna, Arlo Parks, Jack Savoretti, Will Young, The Amazons, Goldfrapp.
• Prize types: signed guitars (Mark Knopfler Stratocaster; Coldplay-signed Fender Telecaster), signed boxsets (Paul McCartney; Liam Gallagher 7-inch), meet-and-greet plus tickets (The 1975, Bastille, Duran Duran, Will Young, James Blunt, Jessie Ware, The Vaccines, Rag'n'Bone Man), Craig David O2 Arena tickets with overnight stay, and similar.
• PR: pro bono by Starscream Communications. Press coverage in NME, Guitar World and Metal Hammer.

What the draw was

A paid-entry prize draw run by the charity on Crowdfunder, not a society lottery and not a commercial house draw. Each entry was £5. A free postal entry route existed by posting an entry on a postcard or in an envelope, which is the standard UK compliance path that keeps a paid prize draw on the right side of gambling law without requiring a lottery licence. The free route is compliance plumbing and was never the offer.

The architectural choice that matters is not the ticket price. It is that the charity did NOT run one #ComeOnHome draw. It ran roughly twenty-five separate Crowdfunder prize-draw pages, each tied to one named artist and one specific prize, and pointed entrants at them from a single hub at crowdfunder.co.uk/comeonhome. Supporters chose which prize they wanted to enter for and paid £5 (or multiples of £5) into that specific sub-draw. The £80,000 headline is the sum of all sub-draws.

The structural consequence: each artist-donor's prize was matched to its own narrow fan-audience, rather than competing with the others for the same supporter's wallet. A Goldfrapp fan and a Stormzy fan are not bidding for the same prize; they are entering different draws, and the charity collects both £5s.

Prize

Two prize logics ran in parallel.

The memorabilia logic (signed guitars, signed boxsets, signed merch) suits supporters who want a tangible artefact. Mark Knopfler's signed Stratocaster and a Coldplay-signed Fender Telecaster are the headline items here; Paul McCartney's signed boxset and Liam Gallagher's signed 7-inch boxset sit in the same logic.

The experience logic (gig tickets with meet-and-greet, VIP packages, an O2 Arena ticket with overnight stay) suits supporters who want the day out and the proximity. Bastille, The 1975, Duran Duran, Will Young, James Blunt, Jessie Ware, Rag'n'Bone Man, Craig David, The Vaccines and others sat in this lane.

Two important properties of the prize structure:

1. Every prize was donated. Prize cost to the charity is at or near zero, so almost every £5 ticket is gross margin against the platform fee and any fulfilment cost. This is the core economic reason a donated-prize draw outperforms an auction for the same supporter pool: an auction monetises a small number of high-bidders; a £5 draw monetises a long tail.
2. The prize was the channel. A signed Stratocaster is not just the lure; it is the social asset the artist can post about, and the post is what the charity could never have bought. This is the load-bearing point the structural lesson rests on, and it is what makes the multi-artist parallel structure work where a single big draw would not.

The 2023 reprise of #ComeOnHome later showed how unevenly the per-sub-draw take can spread: in 2023 the Mark Knopfler signed Les Paul sub-draw alone raised about £25,000. That is one prize doing roughly a third of the run on its own. Parallel structures look diversified, but in practice the take is typically heavily weighted to one or two anchor prizes, with the long tail of smaller draws padding the total and broadening reach rather than driving the headline number. Anyone copying this structure should plan for that distribution, not against it.

Audience

Streets of London is a small charity. Three unpaid trustees, twenty-one volunteers, no paid staff, and most recently published income around £480,000 a year. The charity does not have, and was never going to be able to buy, the 4,500-plus general-audience supporters that bought a ticket in June 2021.

The audience came from twenty-five other lists.

Each donating artist could reach their own fans directly, on their own owned channels: Instagram, Twitter/X, Facebook, mailing lists, fan-club newsletters. A Bastille post about "we donated to this draw" reaches an audience the charity has no equivalent in. Multiply that by twenty-five and you have something close to a general-audience reach, assembled from twenty-five overlapping but distinct fan-bases. This is not a list the charity owns. It is a list the charity rents, in kind, in exchange for the time-cost of co-ordinating twenty-five donor relationships.

That rental is the most replicable thing about the case for a small charity. The transferable principle is that the prize donor's reach IS the distribution plan. You do not need a famous donor to apply it; you need a donor whose audience overlaps with your supporter persona, and a structure that obliges them to post.

The derived per-supporter arithmetic (around £17.77 average spend, three to four £5 tickets per supporter on average) is also worth noticing. The behaviour it is most consistent with is supporters buying multiple tickets, either into the same sub-draw to boost their odds or across several sub-draws because they fancied two or three of the prizes. We cannot tell which without the per-sub-draw breakdown. Either way, the multi-prize umbrella structure unlocked spend per supporter that a single £5 ask would not have.

Marketing

Three channels were doing the work, in this order of importance.

The artist-donor channel. As above: twenty-five contributors posting from their own owned accounts to their own audiences. This is what made the £5 ticket reachable.

Pro bono PR. Starscream Communications ran the press relations on a pro bono basis. Coverage landed in NME, Guitar World and Metal Hammer. The agency reports a reach of "over 18 million" across the press hits, which is an agency self-report and not independently audited; we use it as colour rather than as a headline figure. The PR did one job that the artist channel could not: it converted "twenty-five artists posted" into trade-press validation that an entrant could check before paying their £5.

The Crowdfunder hub at /comeonhome. A single short URL that listed all the live sub-draws, so an entrant who arrived via one artist could see and enter the others. The hub is doing cross-sell. This is the small-but-load-bearing piece of platform infrastructure that turns twenty-five separate draws into a single fundraising moment with a single brand.

The charity director's framing on its own page is brief and worth quoting: "With the right support, people experiencing homelessness can turn their lives around. The money raised through this prize draw will allow us to provide funding to multiple projects across London that give homeless people the help they need." Note that the framing connects spend to project funding, not to overhead. This matters for any small charity considering this format: the case for entry is "your £5 funds vital immediate help" rather than "keep our lights on", which is the right framing for a paid-entry draw where the supporter is exchanging £5 for a chance and a cause, not a donation.

What charity teams should take from this

1. If you can get the donation, design the donor as the channel. The biggest replicable lesson here is not "find a Coldplay". It is that the prize donor's own audience is doing the distribution work the charity itself cannot do. When you secure any prize donor (a local business, an artist, an athlete, a maker, a chef), build into the agreement that they post about the draw to their own followers on a stated cadence. Without that, you have a prize but no channel, and the prize was the cheap half of the equation.

2. Multi-prize parallel structures beat single-jackpot draws when your supporter universe is fragmented. A small charity with no general-audience list can rarely sell a single big jackpot to a single big audience. Twenty-five small asks, each matched to a narrow fan-base, can collectively cover a larger audience than any single ask of the same size. The cost is operational (twenty-five donor relationships, twenty-five fulfilment paths) and the risk is uneven take across sub-draws. Plan for one or two anchor prizes to do a disproportionate share of the work, and treat the long tail as reach, not revenue.

3. The umbrella brand and the cross-sell hub are not optional. Twenty-five separate prize-draw pages with no shared identity are twenty-five small campaigns. The same twenty-five pages under one hashtag, on one hub URL, with a director's framing that ties spend to the cause, are a single fundraising moment. The infrastructure is light (a memorable hashtag, a short URL, a one-page list of live sub-draws). The brand is what makes one £5 ticket-buyer into a multi-£5 ticket-buyer across sub-draws, which is what the derived per-supporter average spend in this draw quietly suggests was happening.

What this case study doesn't claim

• That the £80,000 is independently audited. It is a charity-reported total on the Streets of London events page, treated as an upper-bound headline. The structural lesson does not turn on the exact total.
• That a charity without warm artist relationships can replicate this raise. The celebrity-access layer is the unfair-advantage layer of this case and is not transferable. The transferable claims are about mechanism (donor-as-channel; parallel multi-prize structure; umbrella brand), not magnitude.
• That parallel draws always beat single-jackpot draws. The trade-off is real and runs both ways: parallel structures reach broader audiences and unlock cross-prize spend, but they cost more to operate and the take is usually unevenly weighted to one or two anchor prizes.

Sources

• Streets of London events page for the June 2021 draw, including the £80,000 figure, the dates, the artist list, the director and artist quotes, and the over-4,500 supporters figure. Verified 2026-06-08, reverified 2026-06-12. Source of record for the campaign. https://www.streetsoflondon.org.uk/events/streets-of-london-comeonhome-prize-draw-june-2021
• Charity Commission register for Streets of London, charity number 1155242, including current income and governance details. Verified 2026-06-08. Authoritative for legal status. https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/en/charity-search/-/charity-details/5041007
• Crowdfunder hub for #ComeOnHome at crowdfunder.co.uk/comeonhome, plus individual /p/ sub-draw slugs indexed in search (win-mark-knopfler-stratocaster, win-arlo-parks-tickets, win-bastille-tickets, win-the-1975-tickets, win-the-vaccines-tickets, win-duran-duran-meet-and-greet, win-james-blunt-meet-and-greet, win-will-young-tickets, win-liam-gallagher-boxset-tickets, win-declan-mckenna-tickets). Leaf pages are Cloudflare-protected and return 403 to direct fetch; structure is verified via the indexed slug list. Verified 2026-06-08.
• Audio Media International coverage of the launch, including the £5 entry price, worldwide eligibility, named prizes (Coldplay-signed Telecaster, The 1975 meet-and-greet, Craig David O2 Arena overnight, Duran Duran meet-and-greet). Verified 2026-06-08. Independent trade-press confirmation. https://audiomediainternational.com/streets-of-london-launches-homelessness-fundraiser-with-help-of-coldplay-the-1975-laura-marling-and-duran-duran/
• Starscream Communications case-study page including the director's quote on pro bono PR support and the press-coverage list. The page also restates the £80,000 total for the 2021 event, which corroborates the charity-reported headline figure; as the campaign's pro bono PR agency, Starscream is not an independent source. Verified 2026-06-08, reverified 2026-06-12. Agency self-reported reach figure ("over 18 million") used as colour, not as a headline number. https://starscreamcommunications.co.uk/streets-of-london-charity-event/
• Starscream Communications 2023 launch release, used only as context for the later #ComeOnHome reprise and the £25,000 Mark Knopfler Les Paul sub-draw figure; not used for any 2021 claim. Verified 2026-06-08. https://press.starscreamcommunications.com/streets-of-london-launch-homeless-prize-draw-with-the-help-of-coldplay-stormzy-florence--the-machine-and-more
• Streets of London Starry Night listing for context on the post-pandemic return of the live-concert format in 2024. Verified 2026-06-08. Used only as context; not folded into the 2021 figure. https://www.streetsoflondon.org.uk/events/sn

Cross-reference: factsheet.md (every claim with verbatim quote where one exists and a confidence rating); NOTES.md (archetype decision, weakest points, the corrected lead list).