THE SPORTING MEMORIES FOUNDATION - A WINNING LEAGUE

With a team of just two people, the award-winning Sporting Memories Foundation is able to raise the funds needed to recruit and train more volunteers with the help of CAF Donate.

The Sporting Memories Foundation brings together people aged 50 and over suffering from dementia, depression and loneliness. Running weekly groups in the local community, Sporting Memories works to tackle these issues by engaging those they support in social activities, and triggering conversation through memories of historical sporting moments.

Listed by the Observer magazine and Nesta as one of the top 50 organisations in Britain as tackling some of the biggest social challenges, Sporting Memories was awarded best National Dementia Friendly Initiative by Alzheimer’s Society. Some of their achievements include being recognised for running the ‘best football community scheme’ and being shortlisted against seven Premier League football clubs in the Football Business Awards.

Sporting Memories was able to engage 998 older people in 2016 alone through running their weekly groups – a number they aspire to grow in the coming years. Aiming to raise £1,000 to recruit and train more volunteers to run more of these groups, Tony Jameson-Allen, a Co-founder and Director of the charity, tells us how CAF Donate has helped to attract sponsorship for a group of volunteers tackling the Great North Run:

“CAF Donate allows the options to make one-off donations and regular donations, as well as being able to embed it into social media – which makes fundraising so easy for us.”

With the team of 10 being led by former racing driver and presenter for ITV Motorsports, Paul O’Neill, Tony is optimistic about their £1,000 target:

“I’m hoping we will raise much more than that actually. We have a number of high profile celebrities backing the campaign and helping publicise it, so having that really simple donation platform is essential because people just want to be able to donate in one click.”

The CAF Donate donation widget has been instrumental in helping Sporting Memories receive donations online:

“One of the main things we did when we signed up to CAF Donate was put the donate button on our website, so when our supporters browse through our work, see our videos and choose to support us, they can make a one-off or regular donation. We’ve certainly had a good success in getting a lot of ad hoc donations, and we now have a number of people who donate on a monthly basis, which for a tiny organisation makes a big difference”.

WHY CAF DONATE MADE THE FINISHING LINE

As a small but growing charity, Tony tells us the difficulties Sporting Memories have faced in the past managing their fundraising:

“We were using other fundraising platforms but we didn’t have anything on our website which was an easy way of donating. Trying to manage lots of different giving platforms and monitoring where money was coming from, and from who, wasn’t an easy task and was very time consuming.”

CAF Donate was able to support Sporting Memories in pulling their donation information into one place, allowing them to save valuable time to focus on their fundraising. Using the platform alongside CAF Bank products made fundraising and managing donations a very easy and streamlined process for Tony and the team.

And like many charities, cost was one of the driving factors in making the switch to CAF Donate.

“If people are making donations, we want to receive as much of that donation as possible. The pricing of CAF Donate is far more competitive and attractive for us than other platforms, and it’s a platform that we’re comfortable using”, says Tony.