Ipswich Town Foundation: £75,700 across 13 prize draws on Crowdfunder, built from shirts the club already owns

In April 2023 Ipswich Town beat Charlton Athletic 6-0 at Portman Road, and within a month the shirts the players wore that afternoon had raised £17,867.85 for the club's Foundation. The shirts were signed, listed on Crowdfunder as prize draw prizes at £5 an entry, and 1,316 supporters paid for the chance to win one.

That draw was the first of 13. Between spring 2023 and summer 2026 the Foundation raised £75,700 across them, all on the same Crowdfunder account and most built on the same idea: the squad has already worn the shirts and the club already owns them, so turning them into a prize pool costs a signing session and the postage. Spread over 3 years the series brings in roughly £23,000 a year, one income line among many in a £3 million charity. The reason to study it is what that money cost to raise. The prizes were already in the kit bag, the audience already belonged to the club, and the same trick has now worked 13 times in a row.

At a glance

• Beneficiary: Ipswich Town Foundation, registered charity 1157518, the club's charitable arm. Income for the year to 30 June 2025 was £3,095,777.
• Compiled raise: £75,700 across 13 prize draws on the Foundation's Crowdfunder account, spring 2023 to summer 2026. Figures read from the Foundation's public Crowdfunder pages, July 2026, and itemised in full below.
• The anchor: 5 of the 13 are Foundation Fixture shirt draws, tied to the club's annual charity matchday. They account for £53,533, led by the 2023 Charlton draw at £17,867.85 from 1,316 supporters.
• The rest: a further 8 memorabilia draws raised £22,167 between them, led by a framed Marcus Stewart replica at £8,000.
• Mechanic: paid entry prize draw on Crowdfunder. Entries from £5 with bundle ladders, and a free postal route underneath as legal compliance.
• Entrants: 5,406 paying entries across the 13 draws. One person can enter several draws, so this counts entries rather than unique people.
• Prize sourcing: shirts the squad has already worn, signed by the players, plus donated memorabilia. The 2026 warm up shirts were designed with Call Me Ted and funded by supporter Richard Buss.
• Matchday context: the Foundation Fixture matchday raises over £50,000 in most years across all its income lines. The Crowdfunder draw is one line inside that figure, never to be added to it.

The full run, with the working shown

The £75,700 is not a figure the Foundation publishes anywhere. It is the sum of 13 individual Crowdfunder project pages, read from the Foundation's public account in July 2026. Here is every draw, so the total can be checked.

Draw	Raised	Supporters	Note
Charlton 2023 match worn shirts	£17,867.85	1,316	Foundation Fixture, 16 shirts
Middlesbrough 2024 match worn shirts	£13,515	923	Foundation Fixture, 16 shirts
Millwall 2026 warm up shirts	£10,105	582	Foundation Fixture, 16 Call Me Ted shirts
Wolves 2025 match worn shirts	£8,550	534	Foundation Fixture, 15 shirts
Marcus Stewart framed replica	£8,000	672	proceeds to motor neurone disease care
ITFC 2024/25 third shirt	£5,870	397	Ed Sheeran tour kit, squad signed
Millwall 2026 match worn home shirts	£3,495	228	Foundation Fixture, 15 shirts
FA Cup Jaden Philogene shirt	£2,160	158	v Blackpool, January 2026
Louise Cobbold painting	£2,052	302	painted live in the FanZone
Man Utd or ITFC signed shirt	£1,360	97	shirt swap with Manchester United Foundation
S&P hospitality and signed away shirt	£1,330	88	v QPR, May 2026
Wardley and Huni signed boxing glove	£1,020	76	Portman Road fight, June 2025
FA Cup Nunez shirt	£375	33	funds a Post-16 tour
Total	£75,699.85	5,406	13 draws

A note on the supporters column: a person who entered 3 draws is counted 3 times, so 5,406 is a count of paying entries across the series rather than of unique people. Every draw in the run closed successful.

The Foundation Fixture is the engine

Every season since 2022/23 the club has badged one home game as the Foundation Fixture. Participants from the Foundation's programmes walk the pitch at half time, fill the FanZone and take over the matchday experiences, and for one afternoon the game becomes a showcase for the charity's work. The squad's shirts from that game become the year's prize pool. The Crowdfunder closes within a month of the final whistle, while the coverage is still in supporters' feeds, and picks up 2 free press cycles along the way: the announcement and the total.

The 5 draws tied to the fixture (Charlton 2023, Middlesbrough 2024, Wolves 2025 and the 2 Millwall draws in 2026) raised £53,533 from 3,583 entries. The other 8 raised £22,167. Same charity, same platform, same fan base, same £5 entry point, yet a draw anchored to the fixture averages £10,707 and a draw run cold averages £2,771. The matchday is worth nearly 4 times the money, and that gap is the strongest single piece of evidence in this case: attention the club has already generated does the marketing a standalone draw would have to buy.

The matchday itself raises far more than the draw. The Foundation Fixture's announced totals are £32,388.79 in 2022/23, over £55,000 in 2023/24, over £50,000 in 2024/25 and £54,464.99 in 2025/26, and those figures also take in £1 per ticket and £1 per pint matchday pledges, the Foundation's £2 Matchday Lottery, MatchWornShirt auctions and direct donations. The Crowdfunder draw is one line inside that total, so keep the 2 sets of figures apart.

The rest of the run

The 8 draws outside the fixture series are a mixed bag: an Ed Sheeran tour kit third shirt, a shirt swap with Manchester United's foundation, a portrait painted live in the FanZone, a signed glove from the Wardley fight at Portman Road, hospitality packages. The standout is the framed Marcus Stewart replica, which raised £8,000 from 672 supporters for motor neurone disease care, second only to the Charlton draw itself. A name supporters love, attached to a cause with its own emotional pull, can match the economics of a matchday anchor. The rest sit in the £375 to £2,160 range, which is what a memorabilia draw does when it has to generate its own attention.

Together the 8 show something the fixture series alone would not: the Foundation treats prize draws as a standing income line, reaching for the mechanic whenever the right object appears.

What the entrant pays and what the charity keeps

Each draw sells paid entries from £5 with bundle ladders, and a free postal route runs alongside, which is what keeps a paid draw on the right side of the Gambling Act 2005.

The Charlton draw tells the money story precisely. Crowdfunder's archived project page shows £18,625 pledged by 1,316 supporters over 21 days; the club's announcement puts £17,867.85 with the Foundation. The £757.15 between them is card processing, 20p per pledge plus about 2.65% of the total, and that reconciles the 2 published figures to the penny. Crowdfunder took no platform fee on this type of campaign.

By the standards of paid fundraising that is a very good deal. A £5 single entry delivers about £4.67 to the charity, 93p in the pound. A £20 bundle delivers about £19.27, 96p in the pound, because the fixed 20p falls only once however large the pledge. The fee structure quietly rewards bundles over single tickets, and the Foundation prices accordingly: supporters on the Charlton draw averaged £14.15 a head, nearly 3 entries each.

Why the economics work

Prize cost sits close to zero. The shirts exist because the fixture was played, and turning them into prizes takes a signing session and a laundry run. As charity fundraising goes, this is about as close to money for old rope as it gets.

The audience was never the Foundation's own. A club charity's supporter file is small; the club's fan base is enormous, follows the club's channels, reads TWTD and the local press, and turns up at Portman Road without being asked. The draws are promoted through those channels, so there is no media buy either. When the prize and the audience both arrive free, nearly everything an entrant pays becomes charitable income, which is what the 93p to 96p in the pound above actually measures.

The format helps too. Each fixture draw carries 15 or 16 winners, so in the Charlton draw 1 supporter in every 82 won a shirt. Odds that short are believable, and believable odds show up in the entry counts.

The numbers in proportion

The Foundation's income for the year to 30 June 2025 was £3,095,777, which puts the draw series at under 1% of what the charity raises. The board case for a line like this rests elsewhere: it costs almost nothing to run, it recurs every season without burning anyone out, and it has put 5,406 paying entries through the Foundation's hands, with a warm list of named, consenting supporters behind them, drawn from a fan base that is otherwise anonymous to the charity. Fundraisers spend serious money acquiring lists colder than that.

What charity teams should take from this

1. Run the draw on top of attention you already have. The Foundation's own numbers make the argument: anchored to the fixture, a draw averages £10,707; run cold, £2,771. If your organisation has a flagship event with its own press cycle, an awareness day, a gala or an AGM crowd, that is where the draw belongs.

2. Use prize inventory you already control. The 93p to 96p in the pound only holds because the prize cost nothing to source. Buying the prize eats the margin, and securing a donated one is fundraising work in its own right. Signed stock, behind the scenes access, founder time, an experience only you can grant: most organisations own more prize inventory than they think.

3. If you have no audience, borrow one. Ipswich Town Foundation did not build the crowd that entered these draws; Ipswich Town FC did, over a century. The Foundation borrows it every season. Most charities sit within reach of a partner that owns real attention, an employer, a club, a venue, a personality, and the partner's audience is what a draw actually runs on. The workable version for most charities is a partnership in which the partner supplies the audience and the charity supplies the cause.

Sources

• Charity Commission Register, Ipswich Town Foundation (1157518). Charity details and income for the year ending 30 June 2025. Verified 2026-06-08.
• Crowdfunder project pages for the 13 draws (crowdfunder.co.uk/p/...), figures as displayed July 2026, captured from the rendered pages. Source of every figure in the full run table.
• Wayback Machine snapshot of the Charlton draw page (crowdfunder.co.uk/p/win-a-signed-match-worn-shirt), 28 May 2023. Source of the £18,625 gross figure, the 1,316 supporter count and the 21 day duration.
• TWTD, "Foundation Fixture Raises £32,000", 16 June 2023. Source of the £17,867.85 net figure, the £32,388.79 matchday total and the 6-0 Charlton result.
• itfc.co.uk, "FOUNDATION FIXTURE RAISES £55,000", 26 April 2024. Source of the 2023/24 matchday total.
• itfc.co.uk, "FOUNDATION FIXTURE RAISES OVER £50,000", 29 April 2025. Source of the 2024/25 matchday total.
• itfcfoundation.co.uk, "FOUNDATION FIXTURE RAISES OVER £54,000", 9 April 2026. Source of the 2025/26 £54,464.99 total and the Millwall fixture, 21 March 2026.
• itfcfoundation.co.uk, "2024: Year in Review". Source of the 2023/24 opponent (Middlesbrough, 1-1).
• East Anglian Daily Times / SuffolkNews, Wolves Foundation Fixture announcement, 17 March 2025. Source of the Wolves match date, 5 April 2025.
• itfcfoundation.co.uk, "Foundation Fixture | Key Info" (2025/26 page). Source of the £5 minimum entry, bulk bundles, free entry option and draw timetable.
• itfcfoundation.co.uk, "Foundation team up with Call Me Ted". Source of the 2026 warm up shirt partnership and Richard Buss funding.
• itfcfoundation.co.uk, "Matchday Lottery to raise money for Foundation". Source of the separate £2 Matchday Lottery.
• Fundraising Regulator, "Prize competitions and free draws". Source of the legal framing of paid entry with a free postal route.