Seven-year-old Charlie raises more than £100,000 for Haiti!

By Alex Pashby on Monday, January 25th, 2010 in Inspiration for fundraisers

Wow. Sometimes a JustGiving page just takes off and that’s exactly what seven-year-old Charlie Simpson’s sponsored bike ride for Haiti has done.

Charlie was really upset by the television footage of the Haiti disaster, so, in conversation with his mum, he came up with idea of cycling around South Park near his home in Fulham, London as many times as possible. As Charlie puts on his JG page, ‘at least 10 laps, I hope!’. Charlie set himself a fundraising target of £500 for UNICEF - not an insubstantial amount for a seven-year-old.

The ride, which took place at the weekend, saw Charlie not only smash his distance target - with the final lap of the park taking him over five miles - but at the time of writing this post, his fundraising total is at an amazing… Wait for it… £112,285.07, meaning he’s beaten his target an astonishing 224 times over! And the donations are still flooding in…

As Charlie puts in in this interview with the BBC, “Our aim was £500, but it’s gone mad!”:

Charlie writes on his JG page that he wanted ‘to make some money to buy food, water and tents for everyone in Haiti’.

Here at JG Towers, we’re seriously impressed with young Charlie and we’re not the only ones. Michael Newsom, director of UNICEF’s Haiti appeal said:

“There’s something quite special about a child in the UK reaching out to the children of Haiti. It’s quite fabulous. He’s helping to provide water to hundreds of thousands of people. We’re all overwhelmed with the response to Charlie’s bike ride. We’ve never had anyone raise so much in one day.”

You can view Charlie’s page and make a donation here.

Of course a page that captures the public’s imagination on the scale that Charlie’s has, and the national media coverage that goes with that, comes along once in a blue moon (pun intended), but Charlie’s page proves what we’ve said time and again, that any publicity is good publicity. You might not be able to get your page on national TV, but try approaching your local radio station or newspaper and getting them to mention your web address. You don’t have to be a PR whizz to figure out that the more people that see your page, the more potential donors.

(Thanks to JG’s Kai Vong for the ET poster mash-up.)

Tags: Charlie Simpson, Cycling, Haiti earthquake, unicef

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