12 Days of Christmas to 12 Years of Fundraising

The remarkable story of how Search Seven raised £100,000 for charity – by being a purpose driven business that is focused on charity giving all year round, not just at Christmas.

Search Seven was founded in 2011 with the intention to fully embrace ‘giving back’ as a core part of who we are and what we stand for, with our new slogan ‘Search Marketing for Social Good’ the ethos at the heart of our business.

In October 2023, at our first-ever Search Seven Charity Ball, we celebrated raising over £100,000 for charities chosen by the Search Seven team. With over 220 people in attendance, we managed to raise a further £11,000 on the night, bringing our fundraising total to £120,000.

It’s been 12 years of bringing the community together to make a difference through the 23 events that we have hosted and as it’s Christmas, we thought we would share our 12 favourite images from our fundraising to date, helping to bring to life what we have achieved.

2014
– Our first fundraising event back in 2014 was a charity football match at Shoreham Football Club. The “Ted’s Trophy” – dedicated to raising money for Rockinghorse Children’s Charity in honour of Gavin’s godson Ted – was a real success, raising over £4,000 for charity.

2015
– The first ever Search Seven Charity Golf Day was held at Mid Sussex Golf Club, with 12 teams battling it out for  ‘Ted’s Trophy’ yet again.  This was the start of a regular event in our events calendar.

2017
–
Founder Gavin and his wife Catherine visited Uganda to meet Allan and the Nkuringo School, who Search Seven has supported since 2015. Search Seven donated water tanks,  paid for Allans yearly tuition fees and even  funded lifesaving eye surgery for Gilipina who had a tumour behind her eye.  We also held our first charity football match at the AMEX stadium.

2018
– We launched the #share7 campaign,  hosting three fantastic events that raised £20,000 in one year, including a football match at the AMEX Stadium, a golf day and a quiz night. Through #share7,  our aim was to raise £17,000 in one year to match what we’d achieved in  our first six years! That year we also won the Best Corporate Fundraiser Award at the Brighton & Hove Business Awards.

2019
–  Another Golf day in 2019 plus we supported the RISE Superheroes Run. We won the CSR Excellence Award at the Brighton & Hove Business Awards.

2020
– During the pandemic, and just days after launching our new #share77k charity campaign, we had to postpone several events, like many other charities did too, yet we pivoted quickly, hosting an online Quiz night by the end of March 2020, followed by other events, both offline and online, during the year, to continue to make a difference.

During the pandemic, we had to postpone several events and instead, decided to continue hosting them online. By the end of March 2020, we’d hosted an online quiz night followed by other offline and online events to show that a small business can make a big difference in tough times.

2021
–
We hired out ‘Network My Pub’ for the evening, turning it into ‘S Pub 7’ – our first ever VIP  virtual Pub Quiz  It was a fantastic event, raising over £2,000. By the end of 2021, and to celebrate our 10th birthday party in style, we hit our £77,000 on the night itself through a charity raffle. Here we are celebrating with a few of our chosen charities that came along to celebrate with us.

2022
– In 2022 we launched our #S7100 campaign, with the aim to increase our fundraising to £100,000 by the end of 2023. The Search Seven team kickstarted individual challenges to walk ‘100 Miles in August’ to raise money for their chosen charities as part of the #S7100 Charity Campaign. This was our first big team event, where we met up in London for a London Landmarks Half-Marathon spanning 13 miles. We match-funded everyone’s individual fundraising, bringing the total raised to a whopping £5,000.

2023
– We held our first ever Search Seven Charity Ball at The Grand Hotel in Brighton in October 2023, raising £11,000 on the night.  It was a great way to celebrate reaching our £100,000 fundraising target with all our clients, partners, colleagues, supporters, charities, friends and family in attendance.

Our purpose has remained strong for 12 years. There have been several changes in how we raise money and how we involve the team, but the core principle of our 7% charity pledge has remained a constant throughout.

Since our first ever event back in 2014, we have grown in terms of our approach to fundraising, creating campaigns that have a target attached. This gives us as a team a focus and something we can all work together to achieve. Each campaign builds on the success of the previous one, to increase our overall fundraising since the business was founded.

We have now helped support 48 different charities through 23 charity events that we have hosted and organised,   setting ourselves a new target to keep us motivated to  ‘give back’ more!

With our 15th birthday on the horizon, we have launched a new campaign and a new goal – the #share177 campaign – with the target of increasing our fundraising to £177,000 by the end of 2026.

If you are looking to improve your PPC performance, feel that your SEO could be better, orif you are after some tips on how to embed a CSR strategy into your business – get in touch to book in a FREE discovery call – just contact gavin@searchseven.co.uk

If you like the sound of our events and would like to get involved, send an email to events@searchseven.co.uk or/and subscribe to our newsletter via our website.