The Entertainer’s customers raise £500K with the help of Pennies
The UK’s largest independent toy retailer,The Entertainer, has raised an incredible half a million
pounds for six children’s hospitals. The money was raised from individual donations of less than a
pound made by customers via the digital charity box, Pennies.
The hospitals benefitting are Alder Hey Children’s Charity in Liverpool, Birmingham Children’s
Hospital, Great North Children’s Hospital, Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity, Wallace
and Gromit’s Grand Appeal which supports Bristol Children’s Hospital, and Yorkhill Children’s
Hospital in Glasgow.
Funds raised to date have made an impact on young patients’ lives in a variety of ways. For example
Birmingham’s Children’s hospital have used Pennies’ donations to help refurbish their emergency
ward and to work on improving their cancer care unit.
Alison Hutchinson, Pennies CEO, says “At Pennies we provide an affordable and hassle free way to
donate to charity. It is amazing these small donationsadd up to make a big difference to the
charities that receive them, even when the total is being split amongst a number of well deserving
charities. Since The Entertainer launched Pennies donations have helped thousands of children and
their families.”
Gary Grant, The Entertainer’s Managing Director , says: “We have been working with Pennies for
nearly 3 years and have been delighted and amazed by both the total amount of money that can be
amassed by donations averaging 29p and the willingness of customers to give – we receive many
positive comments from customers about the Pennies initiative”.
Pennies now works with over 50 companies, generating over nine million donations to date, raising
over £2,000,000 for nearly 100 charities including Rays of Sunshine, Shelter, Kids Company, BBC
Children in Need and Macmillan Cancer Support.
-ENDLiz Kearsley
Communications and Marketing Manager, Pennies
[email protected]
07814 047 175
About The Entertainer:
The Entertainer was founded by husband and wife team, Gary and Catherine Grant, in 1981. In
recent years it has experienced strong growth and as a multichannel retailer it now has 89 stores
across the UK and a website – www.thetoyshop.com that has over 4 million visitors each year. It
employs 1000 people in its UK stores, this number rises to 1700 during the lead up to Christmas, and
a further 140 are based at its head office in Amersham, Buckinghamshire.
About Pennies:
The Pennies Foundation, a registered charity, has created Pennies, the electronic charity box. We’re
all familiar with the idea of dropping our change into the charity box sitting on the shop counter. The
electronic charity box is exactly the same idea but it works instead when we pay by card in store,
online and via smartphones.
Pennies makes giving to charity easy and affordable for all: customers can simply press ‘YES’ on the
Chip & PIN machine in-store, or click the ‘Donate’ button online or on the smart device. The request
is for micro-donations – literally a few pennies (1p-99p) - either by rounding up or topping up. It’s
quick: one small step in the payment process, it’s the consumers’ choice and it’s private too. There’s
no pressure or commitment to give and every penny goes to charity.
Micro-donations are powerful. There are 43 million card holders in the UK today, and around 1 million
card transactions an hour. If the UK’s card holders donated 30p once a month well over £150m
would be raised for charity every year.
Pennies is available in a range of national retailers as well as many local merchants and charity
shops.
For more information on Pennies please visit:
www.pennies.org.uk
@pennies_orguk
http://www.facebook.com/PenniesElectronicCharityBox