How do you raise £300,000 for your charity’s cause with a small team and a limited budget? Today, you’ll find out!
We talked with Georgia Akers, Head of Events at Spinal Research, about exactly how the charity plans, promotes and raises a heap of money towards its mission in the London Marathon using JustGiving.
And we get specific. Georgia shares…
- How she recruits reliable and motivated fundraisers from day one
- Keeps the hype going all the way through race day
- The game-changer that raised an extra £100,000 and halved their dropout rate!
As you’ll see, it’s about getting in front of the right people, finding the strategy that works for you, and making the most of opportunities to gain support.
Let’s jump into it.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- How to identify your potential for success
- Setting the right objectives
- Recruiting the best supporters
- The optimum London Marathon fundraising timeline
- The strategy that raised an extra £100,000
- Digital fundraising tools for success
- The JustGiving London Marathon Fundraising Hub
Small charity…giant results
Spinal Research is the UK’s leading charity funding the discovery and development of effective treatments for chronic spinal cord injury.
With work like that, you might think the charity has a team of 100+ people. But they’re smashing it with just a small but dedicated team of only 15 people, and their London Marathon team only two: Georgia and one assistant!
And despite their modest team size, the charity team of 184 London Marathon runners combined to raise £300,000 on JustGiving alone in 2024.
How to identify event potential, then test and scale
Success in London Marathon relies on careful effort, and ongoing stewardship. How does Georgia tell if it’ll have a positive ROI?
“I look at the existing demand from runners, consider the cost-per-runner, and assess the fundraising potential of the event to see if it’s worth purchasing charity places.”
GEORGIA AKERS, HEAD OF EVENTS, SPINAL RESEARCH
From there, she assesses if the value’s worth the cost. “If I think it’s worth it, I’ll purchase a small number of charity places to test the demand, then slowly increase.”
TOP TIP
Got runners in London Marathon 2025 who haven’t set up their fundraising page on JustGiving? Send them your charity’s unique Fundraising Page link to get their pages active quick and easy!
Setting the right objectives
Setting objectives comes down to your charity’s specific goals. For Spinal Research, the main goal in 2024 was building brand awareness whilst gaining new supporters.
“We often find that, as a small charity, people haven’t heard of us unless they’ve been directly affected by spinal cord injury. This event gives us the opportunity to get in front of people who don’t know about us.”
GEORGIA AKERS, HEAD OF EVENTS, SPINAL RESEARCH
The charity also leverages London Marathon to build even stronger relationships with their existing community, whilst raising as much money as possible.
How to recruit new and existing supporters
The charity has an ongoing list of people who have expressed interest in the next year’s event, which they tap into when their London Marathon places are confirmed.
For further recruitment, they split their outreach into cold and warm audiences. Spinal Research attract cold audiences (reaching new people not familiar with the charity) with Facebook ads, and engage warm audiences (their existing community or people who know about them) through organic social posts and email.
“The demand is there; you just have to figure out how to get in front of the right audiences.”
GEORGIA AKERS, HEAD OF EVENTS, SPINAL RESEARCH
Then, as soon as people are accepted into the team, they get a series of resources via email to welcome them and help them start fundraising:
- A prompt to set up their JustGiving page
- Marathon training plans
- Fundraising ideas and inspiration
- Reminders for upcoming milestones (more on this later)
- Personalised support
TOP TIP
For more on how to attract and activate new audiences, get our free JustGiving Guide to London Marathon 2025.
The optimum fundraising timeline: how to keep people motivated all year long
Georgia and her team think about London Marathon all year long, as it’s their flagship fundraising event. And London Marathon wastes no time in releasing ballot places and charity places. They often do it the day after London Marathon, for the next year’s event!
Here’s the fundraising timeline we’ve seen work time and time again:
To keep the excitement going, Spinal Research connects with their team and helps their team connect with each other through:
- A WhatsApp group for answering questions and sharing ongoing inspiration
- Showing up to cheer on their London Marathon runners during the event
- Hosting a post-marathon meetup at a local pub to meet and congratulate their fundraisers after their monumental effort
The £100,000 fundraising difference-maker
Here’s the one change to their fundraising strategy that helped Spinal Research raise an extra £100,000 in London Marathon 2024.
They mapped out a required milestone for their fundraisers, then had a backup plan if people didn’t meet it in time.
“We introduced a required fundraising milestone – people needed to hit 50% of their individual FR target by January to continue on the team.”
GEORGIA AKERS, HEAD OF EVENTS, SPINAL RESEARCH
This strategic milestone attracted more committed runners from the start. On top of that, their fundraiser waitlist let them to pull in new people if others had to drop out.
LIVE NOW: £2,000 DONATIONS FOR LONDON MARATHON FUNDRAISERS
Want to inspire and incentivise your fundraisers like this? Go big: our £2,000 donation giveaway is live now – one big prize every month through November 2024! Learn more.
Spinal Research use JustGiving Campaign Pages for all their London Marathon campaigns.
It’s easy for the charity and their fundraisers to check in on their individual or collective fundraising total. Plus, everyone can see how they’re measuring up against others on the leaderboard – that bit of friendly competition encourages people to raise more!
Another time-saver is having JustGiving connected to their Salesforce CRM via the JustGiving API, which shows them all their fundraisers’ data in one place (including how much they’ve raised on their JustGiving page) – especially helpful for such a small team!
What are your London Marathon goals for 2025?
Spinal Research is in the middle of their 2025 London Marathon campaign and aiming to raise more than ever next year.
“We’re increasing our individual fundraising targets this year to push our supporters to raise more than ever.”
GEORGIA AKERS, HEAD OF EVENTS, SPINAL RESEARCH
Georgia says, “The money raised will help our mission by allowing us to continue to fund cutting-edge research, advance clinical trials, and fund our PhD programme, which is training the next generation of specialists in the field of spinal cord injury.”
Spinal Research are heading toward their 2025 London Marathon fundraising goals by…
These smart strategies are helping them get donations every day. Our advice: adapt these strategies to boost your charity’s London Marathon campaign too!
Check out our 2025 London Marathon fundraising hub for even more resources to help you plan, promote, and succeed in the biggest fundraising event of the year 👇
EVERYTHING YOU NEED
The JustGiving London Marathon 2025 Fundraising Hub
Get all the latest London Marathon 2025 fundraising resources, incentives, and tools to build your charity a winning campaign.
