Bmycharity blog

@OptimistWorld launches Optimist Awards for charities and fundraisers today, #CharityTuesday

It's great to see the launch today of Optimist World's Charity Awards, honouring small to medium-sized charities and inspirational fundraisers.

All charities with a turnover of up to £1 million can enter with a substantial cash prize and global recognition going to the winner courtesy of Optimist World and HSBC Amanah.

And Optimist World is also celebrating the vital role of fundraisers in helping charities - if you know (or if you are) an inspirational fundraiser you can register for one of two £500 donations to the charity you support.

To register please visit http://optimistworld.com/charities.aspx.

Help us name 4 fundraising stars!

They work 24 hours every day, raising millions of pounds for charity - the least they deserve is a name.

We have a tradition of naming our servers - the powerful computers that make everything work at www.bmycharity.com.  Matt, our technical director, has always made the choices in the past, including Kylie, Brittney, Alicia, Zarine and Nelly.  Now, we've got 4 new servers joining our team and we'd like to invite everyone to help choose their names.

Matt favours Beyonce, Natalie, Nicole and Liv:

While Ben is advocating a reappearance for ABBA - Agnetha, Bjorn, Benny and Anni-Frid:

But we don't want to limit the choice to singers, or actors - or even to people.

So if you can think of any person, organisation or concept that deserves to have a server named after them please let us know by posting a comment below! You can suggest 1, 2, 3 or 4 names and please don't forget to explain why.  Once we've got a shortlist we'll invite everyone to vote for the top 4...

And the answer is "David" - and a resounding victory for the men!

The 35 Davids gave an average donation of £37.84, not including Gift Aid, making them generous as well as willing donors.

Here are the top ten most popular first names among donors:

1. David
2. Andrew
3. Robert
4. James
5. Paul
6. Ian
7. Mark
8. Richard
9. Peter
10. Sarah

Most guesses were for men's names, and the list shows that on Tuesday at least, men were much more likely to donate!  Not only that - but the average donation from the 20 Sarahs at £19.55 was well below the David average (and way behind the £128.73 average from the 14 Matthews).

So, ladies, the challenge is to reclaim the fundraising high ground from the men.  With the approach of the Moonwalk on 16 May we're confident it can be done.  In the meantime we encourage all fundraisers to scour their address books for Davids and Matthews!

Achim Kram wins our £50 donation for the Ethiopian Education Foundation for being the first to guess "David" as the most popular donor name on Tuesday - within moments of our announcement through Facebook.  Thanks to everyone who took part - we'll be offering more competitions over the coming weeks, so watch this space!