Tom Daley raised £5,787 in 14 days for The Brain Tumour Charity by raffling a hand-knitted jumper

In early July 2021, in the run up to the Tokyo Olympics, Tom Daley took a chunky rainbow jumper he had hand knitted, photographed it on himself, and put it up as the prize on a Crowdfunder paid entry prize draw for The Brain Tumour Charity. The campaign funded on 22 July 2021, a day before the Tokyo opening ceremony, having raised £5,787 in 14 days. The famous photograph of Daley knitting in the Olympic stands, the one that went genuinely viral, was taken about ten days later. By that point the rainbow jumper draw was already closed.

That sequence matters, because the easy reading of this case ("Daley went viral, so he raised money") is the wrong reading. The £5,787 was raised on the back of an existing, already warm audience that Daley had spent ten months building on his knitting-specific Instagram account (@madewithlovebytomdaley, launched September 2020), plus the broader pre-Olympic press cycle that any Team GB diver gets going into a Games. The viral Olympic knitting moment then drove a separate, larger wave of attention and a separate later fundraiser. This draw was not lucky; it was set up to work.

The interesting thing about this case is not the headline figure, which is small. It is the speed and the cost base. The prize cost the operator his time, not money. The platform was a Crowdfunder template that a charity supporter can set up in an afternoon. The audience was reached through Daley's own channels, which had been growing on the relevant theme for the better part of a year. And the reason the campaign existed at all was that Daley had been supporting The Brain Tumour Charity in memory of his father, who died from a glioblastoma in 2011, for a decade beforehand. None of those four pieces were a cold start. That is the whole story.

At a glance

• Raise: £5,787 for The Brain Tumour Charity (registered charity 1150054 in England and Wales, SC045081 in Scotland)
• Duration: 14 days, funded on or around 22 July 2021
• Platform: Crowdfunder, operator listed as MadeWithLoveByTomDaley (Tom Daley's own knitting brand and Instagram handle)
• Mechanic: paid entry prize draw with the free postal entry route required to sit outside the lottery licensing regime
• Prize: a chunky rainbow jumper, hand knitted by Tom Daley
• Reach: Daley's own Instagram accounts (the knitting account @madewithlovebytomdaley had been running for ten months and was already warm on the relevant theme)
• Beneficiary chosen because: Daley's father Robert died of a glioblastoma in 2011, when Tom was 17

What the draw was

A single prize, one campaign, a 14 day window. People entered by buying a paid entry on Crowdfunder, with a free postal route available as the legal compliance route that keeps the draw outside the Gambling Act 2005 lottery licensing regime. Crowdfunder is the platform, with its own prize draw product line; the operator on the campaign listing is "MadeWithLoveByTomDaley" rather than the charity itself, which means Daley fundraised on the charity's behalf rather than the charity running the draw directly.

It is a paid entry prize draw, not a free entry one. The free postal route exists because UK law requires it; the product being sold is paid entries, and that is what the entire mechanic is designed to convert. Calling it a "free entry prize draw" would invert what the campaign is and is not.

The prize

A hand knitted chunky rainbow jumper, made by Daley himself before the campaign launched. In his own Crowdfunder copy, requoted in press, Daley explained why this specific item came up for raffle and not something more elaborate: "I love to knit and crochet. I have so many things that I have made and they just sit around the house, so I wanted to set up a way to raffle them off and raise money for the Brain Tumour Charity!"

Two features of the prize are doing the work. First, it cost the operator his time, not cash, so every pound of paid entry is gross to the charity minus only Crowdfunder's fees and the cost of fulfilment. Second, the prize was perfectly aligned with the reason anyone was paying attention in the first place. Daley had been talking publicly about knitting and crochet as the thing keeping him sane in the lead up to Tokyo, his @madewithlovebytomdaley account had been posting his makes for ten months, and the rainbow jumper was a recognisable artefact of that body of work. The prize was visibly his, made by him, and on theme with the audience. You cannot fabricate that kind of fit between prize and audience by spending more on a prize.

This is the sense in which we think the case sits closest to (but not inside) the owned-inventory memorabilia archetype: the prize is something the operator already owns or has produced, the prize cost is therefore near zero, and the audience comes through the operator's own channels. The structural difference, which is why we have tagged this with a new proposed archetype individual-led charity draw instead, is that the operator is a named individual giving a personally made object for an external charity, rather than an organisation giving signed product for its own cause. The mechanic rhymes; the actor and the cause-ownership do not.

The audience and the channel

Daley promoted the draw through his own Instagram presence: primarily @madewithlovebytomdaley (the knitting-specific account he launched in September 2020) and @tomdaley (his main account, built over a decade of competing as an Olympic diver). Both were already warm: the knitting account had spent ten months training a follower base specifically on the relevant theme.

Press coverage in the dataset clusters in early to mid August 2021, after the campaign had already closed. That means the earned media wave was not the driver of the £5,787; the £5,787 figure was already on the table before the photographs of Daley knitting in the Olympic stands went global on or around 1 August. The earned media did its work LATER, on Daley's subsequent fundraising activity (a separately raffled Team GB Olympic cardigan reportedly raised a further £6,000, and the 2022 Made With Love book launched off the same wave). The rainbow jumper draw is best read as the campaign that worked off Daley's pre-existing audience, sat in the channel Daley already owned, and aimed at the cause Daley was already known to support. It is a clean test of the mechanic and the readiness, separately from the viral moment that came after.

This matters because it changes the lesson. The case is NOT "build a campaign around a viral moment you can predict in advance"; you cannot predict a viral moment. The case IS "if a warm, narrowly themed audience already exists, a paid entry prize draw with a self made prize is a fast way to convert it, and you can ship that conversion inside a fortnight without a brand sponsor, an event, or a media buy."

What charity teams should take from this

Three lessons, each as defensible at a board meeting as it is at face value.

1. The four pieces have to be pre-built. A draw of this kind cannot survive any of them being a cold start. Daley shipped this campaign inside two weeks because the four critical pieces were already there before he decided to do it: a stockpile of finished knitted items (the prize), a personally meaningful charity he had publicly supported for a decade (the beneficiary), a follower base built specifically around the relevant theme over ten months (the channel), and Crowdfunder's standard prize draw product (the platform). If any one of those had been a cold start, the campaign would either not have shipped in time, or it would have shipped at a much lower raise. For a charity working with high-profile supporters, or anyone planning around the possibility of an attention window opening, the actionable version is "pre-decide": pre-pick the platform, pre-write the boilerplate copy, pre-agree the charity partnership wording, and identify in advance the kind of prize a specific supporter could credibly give without it costing them cash. The unit of preparation is not "a campaign". It is "a 48 hour kit".

2. Authentic personal cause beats a louder cause. Daley raffled for The Brain Tumour Charity specifically because his father had died of a glioblastoma a decade earlier. That biography is what turned the draw from "celebrity does a charity thing" into a story press wanted to cover. For a charity trying to land a high-profile supporter, the lowest friction pitch is almost never "our cause". It is usually the cause they are already linked to by their own life, and then asking whether your work fits inside that. The mistake we see most often, when reviewing campaigns, is fundraisers pitching their own cause to celebrities first and the celebrity's reasons last. Daley's draw is a reminder that the order matters.

3. Prize value is the wrong frame; prize fit is the right one. The chunky rainbow jumper was not valuable on the open market. It was valuable because it was the artefact of the cultural moment driving the attention. If you are working with a high-profile supporter, the right prize is what THIS supporter could credibly produce or give RIGHT NOW that is recognisable as theirs. A more expensive prize donated by a brand sponsor would have produced a worse story and almost certainly a smaller raise. This is not a general rule that hand-made always wins; it is a rule that prize-to-moment fit beats prize-to-retail-value almost every time.

What this case study doesn't claim

• We do not claim the £5,787 is a planning baseline for an arbitrary celebrity supporter. Daley already had a knitting specific Instagram following (active since September 2020), pre-Olympic press attention, a personally meaningful charity connection, and a stockpile of finished knitted items before the draw launched. None of those four pieces are trivial to put in place from cold. A charity attempting to replicate the mechanic without something approaching all four should expect a meaningfully smaller raise.
• We do not assert an entry price, an entrant count, or realised odds. The Crowdfunder leaf page is Cloudflare protected and we found no press citation of the rainbow jumper's ticket cost. A widely reported £2 entry price applies to Daley's separately raffled Team GB Olympic cardigan, which is a different item and a different campaign and should not be blended in.
• We do not claim that the £5,787 figure includes any of Daley's later knitting fundraisers, including the reported £6,000 raise on the Team GB Olympic cardigan or the 2022 to 2023 Made With Love book raffle. Those are separate campaigns and are listed only as context in the factsheet.

Sources

Verified 2026-06-08. Reliability noted where it matters.

• Crowdfunder campaign page, "CHUNKY RAINBOW JUMPER BY TOM DALEY!", operator MadeWithLoveByTomDaley, at crowdfunder.co.uk/p/chunky-rainbow-jumper-by-tom-daley. Cloudflare 403 on direct fetch; metadata and title visible in search engine indexes. Primary source for prize, platform, operator and existence of the draw.
• Philanthropic People, 10 August 2021, "Tom Daley Knits to Raise Money for Charity", at philanthropicpeople.com/2021/08/10/tom-daley-knits-to-raise-money-for-charity. Primary source for the £5,787 figure and the 14 day duration. Trade press, reliability High.
• Her.ie, "Tom Daley's viral Olympic knitting is all for charity", at her.ie/sport/tom-daleys-viral-olympic-knitting-is-all-for-charity-530479. Corroborating source for £5,787 and Crowdfunder mechanic.
• Joe.co.uk, "Tom Daley's viral Olympic knitting is all for charity", at joe.co.uk/sport/tom-daleys-viral-olympic-knitting-is-all-for-charity-283012. Corroborating source.
• PinkNews, 5 August 2021, "Tom Daley shows off impressive hand-knitted cardigan and raises thousands for touching cause", at thepinknews.com/2021/08/05/tom-daley-knitting-olympics. Source for the separate Team GB Olympic cardigan campaign that we have deliberately ringfenced from this one.
• Attitude, 5 August 2021, "Tom Daley knits dog jumper while watching Olympic diving", at attitude.co.uk/culture/sexuality/tom-daley-knits-dog-jumper-while-watching-olympic-diving-and-literally-everybody-is-swooning-303435. Primary source for the verbatim quote from Daley's Crowdfunder copy.
• ITV News, 3 August 2021, "Olympic champion Tom Daley appeals for funding to support 'groundbreaking' brain tumour drug trial", at itv.com/news/2021-08-03/olympic-champion-tom-daley-supports-groundbreaking-brain-tumour-drug-trial. Context for Daley's relationship with The Brain Tumour Charity.
• NBC News, "Tom Daley: From Olympic champion to 'world's biggest crochet influencer'", at nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-life-and-style/tom-daley-olympic-champion-worlds-biggest-crochet-influencer-rcna1608. Source for the September 2020 launch date of the @madewithlovebytomdaley Instagram account and the later Made With Love book raffle.
• NPR, 2 August 2021, "Tom Daley Is Knitting His Way Through The Tokyo Olympics", at npr.org/sections/tokyo-olympics-live-updates/2021/08/02/1023738433/tom-daley-knitting-olympics. Source for the cultural-moment context.
• Charity Commission for England and Wales, register entry for The Brain Tumour Charity (registered charity 1150054), at register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/charity-details/?regid=1150054. Source for charity registration. Reliability High.
• Crowdfunder UK Help Centre, "Prize Draws", at help.crowdfunder.co.uk/en/articles/5367006-prize-draws. Source for the platform's prize draw product description and the role of the free entry route.