Streets of London #ComeOnHome 2023: how 13 parallel artist draws raised about £59,000, and why one signed guitar did over half of it

In May 2023 Streets of London reran the prize-draw format that had served it well during the pandemic: a cluster of separate per-artist draws on Crowdfunder, each tied to one named musician, all closing on the same night under one hashtag. The Prize Draw Company compiled the final totals shown on the individual campaign pages. Thirteen confirmed 2023 draws raised about £59,000 between them. One of those draws, a signed Mark Knopfler Gibson Les Paul, raised £30,155 on its own. That is 51% of the whole campaign sitting in a single prize.

The headline is not the £59,000. It is the shape of it. A multi-artist draw looks like a diversified portfolio: thirteen famous names, thirteen audiences, thirteen chances to win. In practice the take was concentrated to the point of being lopsided. The top prize did more than half. The top two did two-thirds. The bottom ten draws together raised about £14,000, several of them with single-digit or low-double-digit supporter counts despite carrying some of the biggest names in British music. Stormzy's draw raised £100. Lewis Capaldi's raised £145. The Arctic Monkeys' raised £198.

That distribution is the transferable lesson, and it runs against the instinct of most charities planning this kind of draw. The instinct is to recruit for breadth: get as many famous names attached as possible, on the theory that more names means more reach means more money. The data says otherwise. In a parallel-artist bundle the money concentrates brutally on the one or two artists who actually work their own audience. The rest add reach and credibility but very little cash. One committed mid-tier artist who posts to their fans beats ten disengaged superstars who lend a name and nothing else.

A note on scope before the numbers

Streets of London ran more than one prize-draw round, and the rounds are easy to conflate.

The 2023 #ComeOnHome round closed on Sunday 21 May 2023. Its launch release names thirteen artists, and those thirteen match the thirteen draws that carry the "#ComeOnHome Prize Draw 2023" branding: Knopfler (Les Paul), Coldplay (package and meet), Bastille (New York trip), Duran Duran (Las Vegas trip), Florence + The Machine (VIP and boxset), Frank Turner (signed artwork), Paul McCartney (signed Revolver boxset), The 1975 (tickets), The Vaccines (signed bundle), Arctic Monkeys (tickets and poster), Freya Ridings (VIP tickets and merch), Lewis Capaldi (tickets and album) and Stormzy (signed merch).

A separate round in November 2024 (the "Prize Draws 2024" event, open 8 to 24 November 2024) tied several draws to the charity's Starry Night concert at the Royal Albert Hall on 13 December 2024. That round included a Coldplay signed drum skin, three signed Mark Knopfler box sets, a Keane bundle, and the three "Starry Night" meet-and-greet draws (Jake Bugg, Freya Ridings, Birdy). Those six draws were captured in the original page-read sweep alongside the 2023 set, but they are not 2023 and we have not folded them into this case's total. They belong to the 2024 round.

So: this case is the 13-draw 2023 cohort, about £59,000 compiled. If you add the six 2024 draws, the nineteen-draw sweep totals £71,697, but that figure spans two different campaigns a year and a half apart and should not be read as a single 2023 raise. We flag this rather than bury it, because the honest total is the one that makes the lesson trustworthy.

At a glance

• Charity: Streets of London, London homelessness charity, registered charity 1155242.
• Campaign: #ComeOnHome Prize Draw 2023, hosted on Crowdfunder at crowdfunder.co.uk/comeonhome.
• Entry window: 00:01 BST Wednesday 3 May 2023 to 11:59pm BST Sunday 21 May 2023 (18 days inclusive).
• Ticket price: £5 per entry, paid on Crowdfunder. Free postal route available as the standard UK compliance path.
• Compiled total (13 draws): £59,022. Compiled by The Prize Draw Company by summing the final total displayed on each of the thirteen 2023 Crowdfunder campaign pages. No single official 2023 total is published; treat this as a compiled figure, not an audited one.
• Hero prize: Mark Knopfler signed Gibson Les Paul Classic, £30,155 from 1,365 supporters, about 51% of the compiled total.
• Supporter counts: the thirteen per-draw counts sum to 3,053, but these are per-draw entries, not unique people. Anyone who entered more than one draw is counted more than once, so the true number of individual supporters is unknown and lower. We do not report a single supporter headline for that reason.
• Contributing artists (13): Mark Knopfler, Coldplay, Bastille, Duran Duran, Florence + The Machine, Frank Turner, Paul McCartney, The 1975, The Vaccines, Arctic Monkeys, Freya Ridings, Lewis Capaldi, Stormzy.
• PR: pro bono by Starscream Communications.

The 13 draws, with the working shown

These are the final totals as displayed on each Crowdfunder campaign page (Si's first-hand reads, 12 June 2026), sorted high to low. Sum them yourself; the total is £59,022.

Prize	Raised	Supporters (per-draw, not unique)	Share of total
Mark Knopfler signed Gibson Les Paul guitar	£30,155	1,365	51.1%
Coldplay tickets package and meet the band	£9,166	552	15.5%
Trip to New York to see Bastille	£5,281	269	8.9%
Trip to Las Vegas to see Duran Duran	£3,769	155	6.4%
Florence + The Machine VIP tickets and boxset	£3,489	267	5.9%
Frank Turner signed Soundwaves artwork	£3,325	180	5.6%
Paul McCartney signed Revolver deluxe boxset	£1,465	38	2.5%
The 1975 tickets	£1,133	102	1.9%
The Vaccines signed album bundle	£608	77	1.0%
Arctic Monkeys tickets and signed poster	£198	13	0.3%
Freya Ridings VIP tickets and signed merch	£188	17	0.3%
Lewis Capaldi tickets and signed album	£145	10	0.2%
Stormzy signed merch	£100	8	0.2%
Total (13 draws)	£59,022	3,053 (double-counted)	100%

Two derived figures fall straight out of that table. The Knopfler draw is 51% of the total. The bottom ten draws together (everything from Florence + The Machine down) raised about £14,420, which is less than half of what the single Knopfler prize did on its own. You can check both against the table.

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, which is the standard UK compliance path that keeps a paid prize draw on the right side of gambling law without a lottery licence. The free route is compliance plumbing and was never the offer.

The structure repeats the 2021 model: the charity did not run one big #ComeOnHome draw with one jackpot. It ran thirteen separate Crowdfunder prize-draw pages, each tied to one named artist and one specific prize, pointed at from a single hub at crowdfunder.co.uk/comeonhome. Supporters picked the prize they wanted and paid £5 (or multiples) into that specific sub-draw.

Prize

The prize logic split the same way it did in 2021. Memorabilia draws (the signed Les Paul, the McCartney Revolver boxset, the Frank Turner artwork, signed bundles from The Vaccines and Arctic Monkeys) for supporters who want a tangible artefact. Experience draws (the New York Bastille trip, the Las Vegas Duran Duran trip, Coldplay meet-and-greet, Florence VIP, The 1975 and Capaldi tickets) for supporters who want the day out.

Every prize was donated, so the cost of goods was at or near zero and almost every £5 ticket is gross margin against the platform fee. That is the standard economic reason a donated-prize draw beats an auction for the same supporter pool: an auction monetises a handful of high bidders, a £5 draw monetises a long tail.

But the prize is also the channel. A signed guitar is not just the lure. It is the social asset the artist can post about, and the post is the distribution the charity could never buy. This is where the 2023 numbers get interesting, because they show what happens when the asset exists but the post does not.

Audience, and why the take was so lopsided

Look at the supporter counts, not just the money. Knopfler's draw pulled 1,365 supporters. The next highest, Coldplay, pulled 552. Then it falls away fast. Stormzy, Lewis Capaldi and the Arctic Monkeys, between them three of the most commercially powerful names on the list, pulled 8, 10 and 13 supporters respectively.

That is not a story about prize quality. Arctic Monkeys tickets are not less desirable than a signed Les Paul. It is a story about promotion. Knopfler is a Streets of London ambassador with a direct, sustained relationship to the cause, and his draw behaved like an artist who actually told his audience it existed. The single-digit draws behaved like a name attached to a page that the artist never meaningfully pushed. Same platform, same charity, same £5 ticket, same three-week window. The only variable that moved was whether the artist worked their own audience.

This is the recurring truth of the parallel-bundle model, stated as plainly as the data allows: the artist's own promotion is the channel, not the roster size and not the platform. A famous name on a Crowdfunder page raises almost nothing if the famous person does not promote it. A committed promoter with a smaller audience raises real money.

The per-supporter arithmetic carries the same caveat as the 2021 case and the Patchwork case before it. The thirteen per-draw counts sum to 3,053, but those are entries per draw, not unique people. The same supporter entering three draws is counted three times. We do not know how many individual people took part, only that it is fewer than 3,053. That is why we report no single supporter headline.

Marketing

Two channels did the work, in this order.

The artist-donor channel. As above, and as the data shows, this was decisive and uneven. Where the artist promoted (Knopfler, and to a lesser extent Coldplay, Bastille, Duran Duran, Florence, Frank Turner), the draw raised real money. Where the artist did not, the draw raised pennies regardless of the name.

Pro bono PR. Starscream Communications ran press relations on a pro bono basis, as in 2021, and the launch coverage led on the Knopfler guitar. The PR did the job the quiet artists did not: it gave the campaign a public anchor an entrant could check before paying. Notably, the press peg was the one prize that was also the one promoter. The story the press told and the draw that actually raised the money were the same draw.

What charity teams should take from this

1. Recruit for commitment, not for names. The 2023 set had thirteen genuinely famous artists and still concentrated 51% of its take in one of them. The differentiator was not fame, it was who promoted. When you sign a prize donor, the load-bearing part of the agreement is not the prize, it is a written commitment to post to their own audience on a stated cadence. Without that, a famous name is a logo on a page that raises almost nothing. One mid-tier artist who will genuinely post beats a superstar who will not.

2. Plan for concentration, budget for the tail. A parallel bundle does not spread the take evenly and never will. Expect one or two anchor draws to do the majority of the money and the rest to function as reach, breadth and credibility rather than revenue. That is not a failure of the model, it is how the model behaves. The mistake is forecasting it as if all thirteen draws will perform; they will not. Pick your anchor, secure a committed promoter behind it, and treat everything else as upside.

3. The hero prize and the hero promoter have to be the same person. The Knopfler draw worked because the best prize and the most committed promoter were the same artist pointed at the same page. When you choose where to invest your own effort (the asset, the PR, the design, the email), invest it behind the draw with the most committed artist, not the most famous one. If those are different people, follow the commitment.

What this case study doesn't claim

• That £59,022 is an official or audited 2023 total. There is no single published figure; this is a compilation by The Prize Draw Company from the thirteen individual Crowdfunder pages, each of which displays its own final total. The structural lesson does not turn on the exact total.
• That all nineteen draws in the original sweep are 2023. They are not. Six belong to a separate November 2024 round (the Starry Night tie-in, Keane, the Coldplay drum skin and a second Knopfler lot) and have been kept out of the 2023 total. The nineteen-draw figure of £71,697 spans two campaigns and should not be read as one raise.
• That 3,053 is a count of people. It is a sum of per-draw entries that double-counts anyone who entered more than one draw. The number of unique supporters is unknown and lower.
• That a charity without warm artist relationships can replicate the magnitude. The celebrity-access layer is the unfair-advantage layer and is not transferable. The transferable claims are about mechanism: recruit for promotion not fame, plan for concentration, and back the committed promoter.

Sources

• Streets of London #ComeOnHome 2023 Crowdfunder campaign pages, final totals as displayed on each leaf page. First-hand reads by The Prize Draw Company, 12 June 2026. Source of record for the per-draw totals and supporter counts. Hub: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/comeonhome
• Starscream Communications launch release, "Streets of London launch homeless prize draw with the help of Coldplay, Stormzy, Florence + The Machine and more." Confirms the thirteen-artist 2023 line-up, the £5 entry, the close date of 11:59pm Sunday 21 May 2023, and that the Knopfler Les Paul had "already raised nearly £25,000" with a week to run. As the campaign's pro bono PR agency, Starscream is not independent of the campaign. Verified 2026-06-12. https://press.starscreamcommunications.com/streets-of-london-launch-homeless-prize-draw-with-the-help-of-coldplay-stormzy-florence--the-machine-and-more
• Crowdfunder, "Win Mark Knopfler's signed Gibson Les Paul guitar!" The dedicated 2023 hero-prize campaign page. Confirms the prize was a signed Gibson Les Paul Classic (Heritage Cherry Sunburst), the £5 entry, and the entry window of 00:01 BST Wednesday 3 May to 11:59pm BST Sunday 21 May 2023. Source of record for the 2023 hero prize. Verified 2026-06-12. https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/markknopfler
• Context only, not corroboration of the 2023 prize: Knopfler also donated a signed Fender Stratocaster to the charity's earlier 2021 #ComeOnHome draw, covered at the time by Guitar World and uDiscover Music. That coverage belongs to the 2021 round (see the sibling case streets-of-london-comeonhome-2021) and is noted here only as evidence of the ongoing Knopfler/Streets of London ambassador relationship. It is not evidence of the 2023 Les Paul.
• Streets of London, "Prize Draws 2024" event page. Confirms the November 2024 round (open 8 to 24 November 2024) that includes the Coldplay drum skin, three Knopfler box sets, the Keane bundle and the three Starry Night meet-and-greet draws (Jake Bugg, Freya Ridings, Birdy). Used to carve the six 2024 draws out of the 2023 total. Verified 2026-06-12. https://www.streetsoflondon.org.uk/events/streets-of-london-prize-draws-2024
• Jake Bugg, Instagram post promoting the Starry Night draw, referencing the Royal Albert Hall concert on 13 December 2024 and a close of 23:59 Sunday 24 November. Confirms the Starry Night draws are 2024, not 2023. Verified 2026-06-12. https://www.instagram.com/jakebugg/p/DCGzOa1i04u/
• Charity Commission register for Streets of London, charity number 1155242. Authoritative for legal status. https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/en/charity-search/-/charity-details/5041007
• Cross-references: the existing site cases streets-of-london-comeonhome-2021 (the £80,000 2021 edition) and streets-of-london-starry-night-2024 (the 2024 concert). This case is the 2023 #ComeOnHome round and does not restate either.

Cross-reference: factsheet.md (every load-bearing figure with its source and the full 19-draw table including the six carved-out 2024 draws).