‘Like the other 106 volunteers working the phones, I can’t wait to get going’
I organise the volunteers taking calls, and essentially my job is making sure we have enough volunteers to answer every call into our telethon centre. This will be my fifth Red Nose Day telethon.
We’ve been preparing for the past 10 weeks to make sure that everything is ready to go on the night, but I still get that nervous feeling just before we go live. Once the first call drops in, the real buzz starts!
While a lot of people focus on the large donations, the call that stands out for me was from an elderly lady, who was absolutely distraught that she could only afford to donate £2. To her, that £2 was the equivalent of £1,000 to someone else.Like the other 106 volunteers joining me on Friday night, I can’t wait to get going.
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Andrew, BT Telethon site lead
‘We work all year to ensure the night of the TV show is incident-free’
During the Red Nose Day TV show, the traffic to our website and donations platforms peaks after the powerful appeal films, with the highest peak usually for a few minutes around 10pm.
All of our technology is built to cope with this extreme demand. Both our donations and fundraising platforms run on something called Cloudfoundry, which uses cloud-based tech to ensure we have maximum capacity and do not lose the opportunity to collect donations.
We spend all year developing and testing our platforms to ensure we do not suffer a catastrophic failure during our high profile event. We regularly check our ability to handle traffic peaks – we even simulate receiving hundreds of thousands of donations to practise.
We work all year to ensure the night of the TV show is incident-free for our technical teams; we like it to be as boring as possible.
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Zenon, chief technology officer
‘It takes several months to collect all the money’
It’s after Red Nose Day has happened that the hard work starts for the finance team. People send us all the money they have raised from bake sales, dress down days and other fundraising activities either by cheque, online or through their bank. Meanwhile, our corporate partners finalise the income from merchandise sales and promotional offers before sending us their final donations. We collect all the text donations and card payments, and reconcile the cash we receive to the pledges people made and the totals announced.
The next step is to claim gift aid, which typically raises between £4m and £5m a year. It takes several months to collect all the money and find out exactly how much we will have to spend.
Once we receive it we look after it as well as we can. We monitor bank rates to get the best we can and, because the grants we make typically last between three and five years, we invest the money we will hold for longer. To ensure that our investments do not conflict with our grant making, we do not invest in companies that manufacture armaments or tobacco products, or whose primary business is adult entertainment or the manufacture of alcohol products.
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Helen, finance director
‘It’s a huge responsibility to allocate the money’
It is a huge responsibility to decide how to allocate the money we raise through Red Nose Day. When needs are so great across the UK and in the world’s poorest communities, we must support work that will make lasting change and have a really positive impact. We try to channel our funds towards those whose issues don’t always enjoy wide public awareness.
Last year we changed our grants strategy. Our objectives are now to work towards a world in which everyone is safe, healthy, educated and empowered, so we have built a number of grant programmes around these themes.
Organisations can apply for funding to specific initiatives throughout the year. Since we launched the new strategy in May 2016, we have received nearly 2,500 applications, all of which go through a robust assessment process before decisions are made. Our grants team bring expertise from all areas of civil society and alongside the usual checks and balances to make sure funds are well spent, we look for organisations run by passionate people, with vision, leadership and experience. We put local people at the heart of our strategy – ensuring that as much of our funding as possible goes directly to communities, and making sure that projects are listening to people who have experienced poverty and injustice first-hand.
The final decisions are made by our grants committees and voluntary trustees. Grants made in the UK since the new strategy began include St Martin’s Centre in Byker, Newcastle, which provides a range of local support services and a community cafe, and MindWise in Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, which helps new mums struggling with mental health issues. Internationally, we have supported Street Child in Liberia, which supports children working on the streets and living in some of the most dangerous environments in the world, along with Doctors with Africa Cuamm, working in Ethiopia to help women at risk in childbirth keep themselves and their babies safe and healthy.
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Jennie, head of international grants
‘Once we find the right projects to support, we have a responsibility to ensure the money is well spent’
Making decisions about how to spend the money raised is challenging, particularly when charities are facing increasing demand for services at the same time as significant funding cuts. On one hand it is important to fund organisations that provide high quality, effective services to those in need. On the other, we need to drive forward creative ways of changing systems and nurturing innovation.
Once we find the right projects to support, we have a responsibility to ensure the money is well spent. We support organisations to monitor and evaluate their activities so they can demonstrate their effectiveness. It’s critical for us to build a relationship of trust, empowering organisations and the individuals within them – they are the experts.
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Mary, UK grants manager
‘Finally, we want to understand what difference our funding has made’
Comic Relief don’t just give out money. We also help the organisations we fund to really think about how they work. That might be talking to them about strategy to maximise their impact, showing them what they need to track to see how effective their work is, or planning how they can strengthen their work in the future. This keeps you on your toes as every project is different: you might be talking to a two-person organisation working on youth employment in Glasgow in the morning, and a large international charity getting clean water to thousands of people in Tanzania in the afternoon.
We also do evaluations on our funded projects to make sure we understand what difference our funding has made and to inform what we fund in the future.
Thirdly, to understand how the projects from Red Nose Day or Sport Relief have helped over time, we collect data from all of our funded projects in the UK and internationally – given that Red Nose Day started nearly 30 years ago, that this is a lot of data to deal with.
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Jake, strategic lead – evaluation and learning
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