In a year defined by the coronavirus pandemic, many newspapers ran Christmas appeals and Covid-19 emergency appeals.
Media outlets drew monetary support from corporates, high net worth donors, as well as readers. A lot of campaigns aimed to raise funds for youth and food poverty organisations.
The Times and Sunday Times
The Times and Sunday Times 2020 Christmas appeal has raised a record £3.178m for three charities.
The three charities to benefit are FareShare, which redistributes surplus food; Sported, which helps youth clubs to integrate disadvantaged young people in society through involving them in sport; and Tusk, which funds wildlife conservation projects in Africa.
The Guardian and Observer
The 2020 Guardian and Observer appeal has raised £1.4m for three charities supporting disadvantaged young people in communities hardest hit by the pandemic.
The funds will be shared among the charities YoungMinds, Child Poverty Action Group, and UK Youth, which will distribute a portion of its share to grassroots youth projects across the UK.
The Guardian and Observer annual appeal has raised about £9.5m for charities since 2015. It is the sixth successive year in which readers have raised over £1m.
A total of £1,421,000, including an estimated £244,000 in Gift Aid, has been raised for the 2020 appeal. The appeal’s donations handler, the Charities Trust, will be paid a fee amounting to 3% of the gross total.
Evening Standard and Independent
The Food For London Now/Help The Hungry appeal ran as a cross-title campaign between the Evening Standard and Independent.
The newspapers announced that they raised £10m.
The Telegraph
The Telegraph's Christmas Charity Appeal, which closed on 31 January, has raised £836,691 for four chosen charities: Refuge, Carers UK, Macmillan Cancer Support and Cruse Bereavement Care.
Its annual charity phone-in in December raised more than £124,000 in just one day, marking a 25% increase on the previous year’s phone-in.
Last summer, a further £1.2m was raised for its Telegraph Coronavirus Charity Appeal for the poverty charity Turn2us.
Added together, the two 2020 charity appeals have raised well over £2m.
The Daily Mail
This year, the Daily Mail did not run a Christmas appeal and instead spent most of the year raising funds for PPE.
The Mail Force PPE campaign raised almost £12m and 42m pieces of PPE were delivered to the NHS, care homes and health care workers.
It has also now begun a Mail Force Computers for Kids campaign.
The campaign aims to tackle the digital divide which is being exacerbated by the lockdown and is delivering laptops to the children who need them most.
It raised £6.3m raised in 10 days and readers have donated more than £1m.
The Sun on Sunday
The Sun on Sunday has launched its Books For Kids campaign for families during lockdown.
It is running in conjunction with BookTrust — the UK’s largest children’s reading charity — and is calling on readers to send in their old children’s books.
The Sun on Sunday will then pay to recycle them before BookTrust begins free distribution of new publications chosen by its children’s books experts.
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