If your charity missed the Big Give Christmas Challenge, you can still run a matched appeal this December. Applications for this year’s challenge closed on 3 July, but the Big Give’s own model shows how much of a match a charity can find for itself. Participating charities have to secure part of their match funding in advance from their own supporters. Nothing stops you from doing the same thing independently, and two of the five routes below need nobody’s permission but your own.
Planning a December appeal from scratch? Our guide to Giving Tuesday for small charities with no budget covers the groundwork.
How a match works, and why you can build one yourself
A match is a promise from someone that every pound given during a set period will be doubled, up to a limit. It works because donors respond to the idea that their gift unlocks money that would not otherwise arrive.
The Big Give Christmas Challenge, which runs from 1 to 8 December and raised £57.4 million for more than 1,500 charities in 2025, combines two sources of match money. Its Champion funders, the trusts and foundations it works with, provide one part. The charity’s own pledgers provide the rest, and a charity has to secure those pledges before the campaign starts.
That second part is the one you can reproduce. What the Big Give adds is a well-known platform, a fixed week and the Champion money. What it does not supply is the relationship with the people willing to pledge, which is yours already.
Ask your own supporters to pledge the match
The most direct route, and the one to try first.
Find one person, or a small group, willing to put up a sum on the condition that the public matches it. A trustee, a long-standing donor, a former beneficiary’s family who want to give something back, a local philanthropist who already knows your work. A pledge of £1,000 lets you tell every supporter that the first £1,000 they give will be doubled.
Several smaller pledges work as well as one large one. Five people each pledging £200 gives you the same £1,000 match, and each of them now has a stake in the appeal succeeding and a reason to share it.
Ask in October. Pledgers need time to decide, and you need the total confirmed before you write any appeal material, because the size of the match sets the target.
Ask a local business
A local business may be glad to act as the match funder, particularly one whose customers are the same people you serve. The simplest version is a straightforward donation: the business pledges a fixed sum to match public donations up to that amount, and gets named as the funder in your appeal.
Keep it to that simple version if you can. If the business instead offers to give a share of its own sales, for example, a pound for every coffee sold, the arrangement becomes a commercial participator agreement. That brings legal requirements, including a written agreement in place before the promotion starts. It can be done, but it takes longer to set up and is not the right thing to agree in a hurry in late November.
Apply for match funding through Crowdfunder
Crowdfunder UK runs match funding through partners, which include corporate funders and public sector bodies. The model is different from a grant. You set up a crowdfunding campaign first, and partners fund projects back according to how well the campaign is doing with the public.
Eligibility depends on where your project is based, since some partners fund only particular regions, on what the project is for, and on the type of organisation running it. Charities and other not-for-profit organisations can apply, though personal cause fundraisers and prize draws are not eligible.
The practical point is to check what is open before you plan around it. Partner funds change through the year, and the right one for your charity may be run by your own local authority. Crowdfunder lists what is currently available on its match funding pages. If you find one that fits, apply early, because funds allocated on campaign performance reward the charities that start strongly.
Not listed on Nonprofit Voice yet? A free directory profile, written in your own words, gives anyone who hears about your appeal somewhere to check who you are. List your charity for free.
Ask supporters to check their employer
Many employers will match donations their staff make to charity, often pound for pound and usually up to an annual limit. The Charities Aid Foundation runs a matched giving scheme that companies use for this, alongside payroll giving, and plenty of other employers run their own.
There is no official list of which companies offer matching, so the only way to find out is for your supporters to ask. Put one line in your appeal and your thank-you message suggesting they check with their HR team. It costs nothing, and a supporter who gives £50 and has it matched by their employer has given you £100.
One thing to get right. Gift Aid applies to the supporter’s own donation if they are a UK taxpayer, but not to the part their employer adds. Companies receive tax relief on their charitable giving through a different route, so do not claim Gift Aid on the employer’s portion.
Make sure the match is real
This matters more than any of the routes above, and it is where matched appeals most often go wrong.
A match only works if it is genuine. The money should arrive because the public gave, and it should not arrive if they did not. If your pledger would have given the full sum regardless, or if the “match” is naturally money the charity was going to spend anyway, then telling donors their gift is being doubled is not true. The Code of Fundraising Practice requires fundraising not to mislead, and a match that unlocks nothing is a textbook example of doing exactly that.
Three things keep a match honest. Agree with the pledger what happens if the public does not reach the match total, and put that agreement in writing. State the limit in your appeal: “donations are doubled up to £1,000” is honest, while “your donation will be doubled” with no cap is not once the pledge runs out. And when the match is used up, say so on your donation page the same day.
Matched appeals also overshoot more often than ordinary ones, because doubling encourages giving. If your appeal names a specific target, write down in advance what happens to money raised above it. Our guide to what to do when a charity appeal raises too much or too little explains how.
Get ready for next year’s Big Give
The fifth route does not help this December, but it is worth starting on now.
The Big Give runs several match campaigns through the year, not only at Christmas. In 2026, they included Arts for Impact for arts and culture charities in March, Earth Raise for environmental charities in April, and a match campaign for small charities during Small Charity Week in June, run with Global’s Make Some Noise and NCVO. Several of these open for applications months ahead: in the 2026 cycle, Arts for Impact applications opened in October 2025 and Earth Raise in November 2025.
The Christmas Challenge itself opened for applications on 11 May this year. If you want to take part in 2027, put a reminder in your calendar for next spring, and use this December to find out if your supporters will pledge. A charity that has already found its own pledgers once goes into a Big Give application with the hardest part done.
Running an appeal this December? A featured campaign placement puts it in front of donors browsing Nonprofit Voice through the whole giving season, with a button straight to your own donation page. Apply for a featured placement.
