Lisa's first contribution to the blog . fundraising at Christmas time :)

Okay, so probably best to point out first that this is Lisa writing ... a Kili team member! Nigel has kindly (or perhaps foolishly) given all team members access to the blog so I thought I'd share my fundraising wisdom with you all :)



That's me ... oh and Nigel of course at the top of Ben Nevis a few months back!



As the clock ticks by, our fundraising efforts have moved up another notch.  With a total pot currently sitting at around £38,000 we have exceeded our expectations already, but fingers crossed with a few big events planned and a few more fundraising ideas up our sleeves we should hit the big £50,000 by the time we go.  Fingers crossed.

So in terms of the fundraising I've been doing ... well back in December I jumped on the back of the London office's (Sportingbet) charity raffle and managed to persuade them to change the charity this year to the Injured Jockey's Fund, one of the Kili team's charities, and one of the core charities Sportingbet supports.  

The charity raffle is an annual event where all Christmas gifts recieved by Directors and Senior Managers are pooled together and employees buy raffle tickets to win the gifts.  This year we had an incredible amount of gifts ... who said we were in a recession?!  Gifts included hampers from Harvey Nicholls, Fortnum and Mason and Harrods and far too many bottles of wine and champagne.  Our sponsorship team also gave away tickets to some of our sponsored teams matches over the Christmas season including Wolverhampton Wanderers on Boxing Day and Spurs during January.  In total we had over 40 prizes to give away!!

As you can imagine, most people were pretty keen to buy a raffle ticket, with some people actually splashing out and buying over twenty tickets each, all at £1 per ticket.  In total we managed to raise just under £1,400.

It's worth mentioning here that one of the prizes was a whole leg of Serrano Ham given by one of our Spanish clients. It looked truly amazing and apparently is worth quite a bit of money.  Anyway, one of my colleagues was deperate to get his hands on this prize.  When he didn't win, he proceeded to give the actual winner £150 in cash to take the prize away.  This money was donated to our total fundraising pot!

Thanks to everyone based in the Sportingbet London offices ... a great start to my fundraising efforts!

Outside of this, I have a few ideas planned for January besides simply pestering everyone I know every way I know possible - facebook, twitter, email, in person, by text ... ... ... :) 

My first idea - a small change box on my desk - is already in action (see picture) ... its only raising pennies, but as they say, "every penny counts"!! 

As for my training ... let's just say my quad muscles hurt A LOT!