Why Tom Daley's four-draw knitting series raised £6,380, no more than one viral jumper did the year before

Tom Daley's 2021 knitted-jumper draw is already on this site, and it worked because of a real moment. He had been filmed knitting poolside at the Tokyo Olympics, the clip went round the world, and a single focused draw for one Rainbow Jumper raised £5,787 for The Brain Tumour Charity. One draw, one covetable object, one viral wave behind it.

The following year he tried to do it again, at scale. Tied to his Made with Love knitting book, he ran four separate Crowdfunder draws for four knitted designs: a superlong scarf, a Fairisle sweater, a chevron throw and a cable sweater. Each had its own page, its own prize, its own entrants. Read across the four closed pages, they compiled to £6,380 from 354 supporter-entries. Four draws, four prizes, a great deal more effort. Roughly the same money as one jumper raised on its own the year before.

That flat result is the case. Not a failure, the charity raised real money for a cause close to Daley's family, his father having died of a brain tumour in 2011. But a clear illustration of something a fundraiser sitting on a viral hit needs to understand before they try to repeat it: a hit does not automatically franchise, and spreading a follow-on across many prizes tends to divide the pull rather than multiply it.

The headline is a compiled total, not a single draw

Before anything else, the arithmetic must be set out plainly, because this is four campaigns presented as one number and that needs to be honest.

There was no single Tom Daley knitting draw in 2022. There were four. Each ran as its own Crowdfunder prize draw with its own raised figure on its own page. The £6,380 is our sum of those four pages, read on 2026-06-13 after all four had closed as Successful. Daley did not publish a combined total, and the charity did not present these as one campaign with one result. We aggregate them to study the programme as a whole, and we show the parts so the whole can be checked.

Draw	Raised	Supporters
Scarf	£1,020	99
Fairisle Sweater	£1,730	87
Chevron Throw	£2,390	121
Cable Sweater	£1,240	47
Compiled total	£6,380	354

The supporter figure of 354 is a count of supporter-entries across the four pages, not 354 distinct individuals; the same person could have entered more than one draw. Add the four raised figures and you get the headline. That is the only sense in which £6,380 is real: as the sum of four checkable parts.

At a glance

• Compiled total: £6,380 across four separate draws (our arithmetic on four Crowdfunder pages, each closed and marked Successful, read 2026-06-13)
• Supporter-entries: 354 across the four draws (a count of entries, not necessarily distinct people)
• Beneficiary: The Brain Tumour Charity
• Prizes: four knitted designs by Tom Daley, one per draw: a superlong scarf, a Fairisle sweater, a chevron throw and a cable sweater, each tied to his Made with Love book
• Entry: tiered, from £5 or £10 depending on the draw, standard Crowdfunder prize-draw format
• Ran: roughly 30 November 2022 to 4 January 2023
• Mechanic: four parallel paid-entry prize draws, each with its own prize and page
• Platform: Crowdfunder
• For comparison: the 2021 single-jumper draw raised £5,787 on its own, documented separately on this site

The comparison that matters: one draw in 2021, four in 2022

This is the rare case where a like-for-like comparison is fair, because it is the same ambassador, the same charity, the same platform and the same broad idea, a knitted item by Tom Daley, run one year apart. The only real variables are the number of draws and the freshness of the moment behind them. That is exactly what makes the comparison instructive rather than forced.

In 2021, one draw raised £5,787. In 2022, four draws raised £6,380 between them. The 2022 programme did about ten per cent more in total while doing four times the work, four prizes to make, four pages to build, four campaigns to promote. On a per-draw basis the 2022 outings averaged under £1,600 each, against the single 2021 draw's £5,787. The effort went up fourfold; the return per unit of effort fell by roughly two thirds.

Two forces, working together, most plausibly account for that. They are worth naming separately because a fundraiser can guard against each one.

Novelty decay: the second time, the surprise is gone

The 2021 draw rode a genuine viral wave. The image of an Olympic diver knitting between rounds was a surprise, and surprise is what spreads. By late 2022 the idea of Tom Daley knitting was no longer news. It was a known thing, attached to a book. The same prize concept the second time around carries none of the discovery energy that powered it the first time, because the thing that made people share it has already happened.

We see the identical pattern at RZSS, where a draw repeated against the same asset undershoots the first run. A scarce experience or a novel idea has a first-outing premium that does not come back. The first time you give away after-hours access to a zoo, or a jumper from a viral knitting moment, you are selling discovery as much as the object. The second time, you are selling the object alone, and the object alone is worth less.

This is not a reason never to repeat a successful draw. It is a reason not to forecast the repeat at the level of the original, and not to be surprised when the encore raises less for more work.

Diffusion: four prizes split the pull a single prize concentrates

The second force is structural, and it is the one most within a fundraiser's control. A prize draw works by concentrating desire on one covetable thing. Everyone who wants that thing is funnelled into the same draw, and their combined want becomes one large pool of entries. Split the offer across four prizes and you split the pool four ways. Each draw now competes for a slice of the same finite audience, and a supporter choosing between a scarf, a sweater, a throw and another sweater may enter one, or none, rather than piling into a single must-have item.

This is the lesson from our EarthPercent case, where spreading attention thins it. The 2022 per-draw figures show the diffusion plainly: the strongest single draw, the chevron throw at £2,390, still fell short of the 2021 jumper's £5,787, and the weakest, the cable sweater at £1,240 from just 47 supporters, suggests an audience already tiring by the fourth ask. Four good prizes did not add up to four times one good prize. They divided one audience's attention.

Had the same creative effort gone into a single, clearly best knitted design with one focused campaign behind it, the concentration that made 2021 work would have been preserved. The 2022 programme spread itself thin instead.

What charity teams should take from this

1. A viral hit is a moment, not a franchise. If you catch lightning once, treat the result as a one-off unless you have evidence otherwise. Do not build next year's budget on the assumption that the same idea repeats at the same level. The surprise that powered it does not come back on demand.

2. Concentrate the follow-on, do not spread it. If you do run again, put your weight behind one covetable prize, not a spread of several. A draw earns its money by funnelling one audience into one pool of desire. Four prizes split that pool; they rarely multiply it.

3. Forecast the encore below the original. Both novelty decay and any audience fatigue pull a repeat downward. Plan the second outing to raise less per unit of effort than the first, and you will not be caught out. Treat anything above that as upside.

4. Decide deliberately between depth and breadth. There are reasons to run several draws, more chances to win, more price points, a longer campaign window. But know the trade. Breadth buys reach at the cost of intensity. If your asset is one genuinely coveted thing, depth almost always beats breadth.

What this case study doesn't claim

• It does not present £6,380 as a single-draw result. It is a compiled total of four separate Crowdfunder campaigns, summed by The Prize Draw Company from the four closed pages. The per-draw table above is the unit of truth.
• It does not claim 354 distinct individuals took part. The figure is a count of supporter-entries across four pages, and the same person could appear in more than one.
• It does not assert exact entry prices per draw. Tiers varied from £5 or £10 by campaign in the standard Crowdfunder format; the precise tier ladder on each page is not asserted here.
• It does not claim the 2022 programme failed. It raised real money for The Brain Tumour Charity. The point is comparative: four draws of effort returned roughly what one focused draw had the year before.
• It does not assert the cause of the flat result with certainty. Novelty decay and diffusion are our reasoned reading of the pattern, consistent with the RZSS and EarthPercent cases, not a claim sourced from the charity.
• It does not attribute the 2021 figure of £5,787 to this campaign. That was a separate single draw, documented elsewhere on this site, and is used here only as the like-for-like comparator.

Sources

• Tom Daley's Made with Love scarf, Crowdfunder campaign page, https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/tom-daleys-made-with-love-scarf (£1,020 from 99 supporters, read after close, status Successful). Read 2026-06-13. Reliability: primary observation of the platform's own campaign total.
• Tom Daley's Made with Love Fairisle sweater, Crowdfunder campaign page, https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/tom-daleys-made-with-love-fairisle-sweater (£1,730 from 87 supporters, read after close, status Successful). Read 2026-06-13. Reliability: primary observation of the platform's own campaign total.
• Tom Daley's Made with Love throw, Crowdfunder campaign page, https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/tom-daleys-made-with-love-throw (£2,390 from 121 supporters, read after close, status Successful). Read 2026-06-13. Reliability: primary observation of the platform's own campaign total.
• Tom Daley's Made with Love cable sweater, Crowdfunder campaign page, https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/tom-daleys-made-with-love-cable-sweater (£1,240 from 47 supporters, read after close, status Successful). Read 2026-06-13. Reliability: primary observation of the platform's own campaign total.
• The compiled total of £6,380 from 354 supporter-entries is The Prize Draw Company's arithmetic, summing the four campaign pages above. It is not a figure published by Tom Daley or The Brain Tumour Charity. Reliability: our own calculation on four primary observations.
• The Brain Tumour Charity, "You could win Tom Daley knitted designs", https://www.thebraintumourcharity.org/news/charity-news/you-could-win-tom-daley-knitted-designs/ (the beneficiary, the four-design structure, the book tie-in, and Tom Daley's connection to the charity through his father's death from a brain tumour in 2011, and the draw window of 30 November 2022 to 4 January 2023). Reliability: official charity channel.
• For the 2021 comparator: the separate Tom Daley Rainbow Jumper draw, £5,787 from a single focused draw, documented in its own case study on this site. Reliability: prior primary observation in this library.