Thank you everyone! Your exceptional generosity means that we now have the full quota of £12,500-worth of pledges added to our Christmas Challenge. Please do not attempt to add any more.
This year, we shall be using our Big Give Christmas Challenge to top up our Ramsay Research Fund, which pays for biomedical research studies into this wretched illness and encourages scientists working on Long Covid to include people with ME/CFS in their own studies.
This Christmas, we want to raise £50,000 to top up the Ramsay Fund, where fundraising fell away quite dramatically during the pandemic.
The Big Give is a philanthropic fundraising platform set up 15 years ago by Sir Alec Reed. It has raised £156m for Britain's charities so far – mainly by invoking the power of their sleek ‘Double Your Donation' facility.
The Big Give will now ask their own corporate supporters if they want to match our £12,500 pledges. If they do, there could be £25,000 available for doubling up when our own Christmas Challenge opens for donations on ‘Giving Tuesday', 30th November.
The public appeal will last for seven days until midday on 7th December, after which the pledges become due for payment.
Pledgers must not pay up before the due date. If by mistake they do, their pledge falls out of the matched funding pot and it will then be treated as a normal donation which cannot then be used to double up other people’s donations.
We will be in touch with all pledgers immediately after the public appeal in order to collect payment.
Thank you again, our fabulous pledgers, for your support!
For details of our ‘Energising M.E. Research' appeal, please visit here.