Chris Moyles Red Nose Rally - DON'T TEXT IN!

student100

If you listen to Radio 1, you won’t be able to avoid hearing about the Chris Moyles Red Nose Rally. At every opportunity they’re trying to get you to text in and donate money to Comic Relief. However, DON’T DO THIS! TEXTING IS A VERY INEFFICIENT WAY TO DONATE.

If you text the Radio 1 number, you will probably spend £1.10*, of which only 70p will go to Comic Relief. (The rest is partly VAT and partly excessive service charges).

If you don’t want the prizes, then please donate with a credit or debit card online at www.rednoseday.com or by calling the phone number on Red Nose Day. If you are a UK taxpayer, say you want to “giftaid**” your donation. That way for every pound you donate, £1.28 will go to Comic Relief.

This means that if you donate £1 by credit/debit card (and you giftaid it), instead of texting to Radio 1 just once, you will be giving 58p more to Comic Relief – making your donation worth an extra 80%. And it will probably cost you less too.

Please do donate lots, but do it by the most efficient method.

Thank you.


*£1.10 is made up of a £1 premium text charge, plus the standard network charge for sending your text, which I have assumed is 10p.

**Giftaid works roughly as follows: For every £1.28 you earn, you will pay 22% tax, which leaves you with £1 in your pay packet after tax. If you donate this pound with giftaid, the taxman will give the 28p tax you paid to the charity as well. More info and restrictions here.

David_Brent

All this crazy teletexting

Fatboy_NSS

However if you pay by debit card, Comic Relief will have to pay a handling fee to the bank that's probably around 30p. At least on the text they're up front about telling you how much is service charge and how much goes to the charity.

student100

Fatboy_NSS wrote:

However if you pay by debit card, Comic Relief will have to pay a handling fee to the bank that's probably around 30p. At least on the text they're up front about telling you how much is service charge and how much goes to the charity.

Firstly, I don't think it's as much as 30p - processing fees are usually more like 15-20p for debit cards or 2 or 3% for credit cards (probably a lot less for large organisations). Also, I think this cost is borne by corporate sponsors on behalf of Comic Relief.

And even if it did cost 30p, if you make a £1 Gift Aid donation it will still mean more money goes to charity than when you text the BBC number just once. (I have also noticed that Radio 2 are using the same number for other fundraising efforts).

You can donate efficiently using any of the following methods:

- Online here.
- Phone: call the automated Donation Line: 08457 910 910 (calls charged at local rate; please have your card details ready).
- By post, make cheques payable to Red Nose Day 2005 and sent them to Red Nose Day 2005, Ernst and Young, PO Box 51543, London, SE1 2UG.
- At banks, building societies or the post office. Just ask to pay your money into the Red Nose Day 2005 account.
(modified from http://www.rednoseday.com/footpages/faqs.shtml)