The Christmas Challenge is the UK’s biggest match funding campaign, run by the BigGive.

For seven days, starting on Giving Tuesday, it offers supporters of participating charities the opportunity to have their donation doubled. First launched in 2008, the Christmas Challenge has become a popular and successful fixture of our fundraising calendar and has raised almost £120,000 for a variety of our projects and programmes since 2017.

You’ve helped to raise funds for 125,000 lunchtime meals

Our 2022 BigGive Christmas Challenge campaign has now ended with the final total (excluding Gift Aid) standing a £15,000.

Our initial £5,000 of matching funds was exhausted within the first 48 hours of the week-long campaign however one of our original match funders generously pledged an additional £2,500 in matching funds, meaning donations totalling £7,500 from 35 donors were matched £-for-£.

The funds raised will pay for the food for around 125,000 of the approximately 550,000 lunchtime meals that our partner schools will provide to their 3,000 pupils in 2023.

Thank you to all those that supported our campaign this year and to our match funders including the Friends of the Reed Foundation.

Frequently Asked Questions

The minimum donation has been reduced this year from £5 to £1 to allow even more people to donate, whatever their budget. Donations of up to £25,000 can be made but any amount donated above the amount in matching funds we have left available at the time the donation is made will only be processed as a normal unmatched donation. For example, if you donate £1,000 but we have only £500 remaining in matching funds at the time then only £500 of your donation will be matched. It will be very clearly displayed when you make your donation whether we have matching funds remaining and, if so, exactly how much.

We usually have two pots of ring-fenced matching funds available; one which been pledged by our Trustees and major supporters and a further pledged by our BigGive ‘Charity Champion’. Donations are first be matched using the pledges from our Trustees and supporters; only when this is exhausted is Charity Champion funding be used to match donations.

In the past our ‘Champions’ have included the Coles-Medlock Foundation and the Reed Foundation. Occassionally, we have taken part in a private-match using only pledges from our own supporters when we have been unsuccessful in securing ‘Champion’ funding.

Donations must be made online using a debit/credit card. The following card types are accepted:
Mastercard / Visa / Maestro / Switch / Solo / Delta / American Express / CAF Bank Business cards displaying the MasterCard® logo

No. Only donations made online via theBigGive website will be matched. No cash or cheque donations, or donations made directly via the CAF donation form on our website or via any other donation platform such as JustGiving or GlobalGiving will be matched. 

You are able to donate from abroad as long as you have one of the accepted card types. These are Mastercard / Visa / Maestro / Switch / Solo / Delta / American Express. As the Christmas Challenge is hosted in the UK, all references to time are Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT. If you are donating from abroad, you will need to donate via thebiggive.org.uk from midday GMT on Tuesday 30 November – you can check what time that equates to where you are here.

All donations made via the BigGive platform are subject to a small payment processing fee of 1.5% plus 20p*.

At checkout you will be given the option to add a voluntary tip to your donation to help towards the costs of running the BigGive.

Read about more about fees here.

 

*For donations made using a UK/EU Visa or Mastercard. Non EU and American Express donations are subject to a processing fee of 3.2% plus 20p.

Yes. All online donations are processed by Stripe and are securely encrypted and processed using SSL with a minimum 128-bit encryption and firewalls. It only stores card data on PCI DSS Level 1 compliant servers, the highest level of security. Furthermore, your connection to the Big Give is encrypted so it is perfectly safe to donate via their systems. 3D Secure may also be incorporated by your card issuer to complete the donation process.

Got another question..?

If your question has not been answered above then please get in touch with us. Drop us a message using the contact form on our website here, email us at hello@africanpromise.org.uk or call us on +44(0)20 7193 2137

Christmas Challenge 2020

In 2020 we raised a total of £22,307 (including matching funds and Gift Aid) thanks to donations from more than 60 donors, old and new, our pledgers and our ‘Champion’ the Coles-Medlock Foundation.

Christmas Challenge 2019

Our 2019 Christmas Challenge campaign raised £20,000 (including matching funds) for our school lunch programme. We received donations from almost 50 existing supporters and first-time donors.

Christmas Challenge 2018

We raised a donation matching week record of £40,000 (including matching funds) in 2018 towards our project to redevelop an eighth partner school at Mkamenyi Primary.