Marcus Richards
Play Fund Win is revolutionary digital fundraising platform that makes raising money simple for sports clubs, events and charities.
It is human nature to want to support causes that we are passionate about. It is also human nature to want to win prizes.
We are on a mission to hit both of these objectives by raising millions of pounds for communities, grassroots sports clubs, charities and good causes whilst giving everyday people the chance to win amazing cash and money can’t buy prizes.
Tell us about yourself?
I class myself as a digital entrepreneur, from the age of 15 i started working in the digital space wanting to create new things and solve problems.
If I’m brutely honest, i feel into what i do naturally through being a curious nerdy teenager. This curiosity was accelerated when i feel ill and was needing to stay homebound a lot for 12 months meant i had a lot of spare time to continue to learn & play.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
Keep going… One thing i see so so many times is people give up too easily, i think one thing i have learnt pretty early on in my life was resilience to keep going, when the surroundings / outside factors are against you if you believe in the thing your doing keep going!
Especially with the recent events in the world it become too easy of an excuse to make an escape and blame but the phrase of keep going was always something i would result back to.
What problem does your business solve?
Fundraising around the world is changing. Charities and grassroots sports teams are losing income as cash-based fundraising becomes redundant in a digital world.
No more so than the 250,000+ community sports clubs across the UK who traditionally fundraise through manual processes that take a significant volunteer commitment to achieve.
We provide a simple way for good causes to host digital prize draws, raffles and lotteries, reversing the decline in donations by engaging those who support the cause (often family & friends on touchlines, courtside or poolside, and in particular those who can’t be at the game or event in person) and giving them the chance to win cash and money can’t buy prizes in return for supporting the cause.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
The inspiration came from one of the other founders seeing it first hand in the stadium environment when he was working as stadium director saw the common problem first hand, and years on kept seeing it so thought there must be away for simplifying and solving this issue.
What is your magic sauce?
Scalable from a grassroots club with 10 members staging draws up to the current European
and Premier League Champions.
- Centralized, proprietary platform to hold prize draws, raffles and lotteries all in one simple place
- Low fees with the integrity of fundraising woven through everything we do our fees remain lower than our competition
- Agnostic to the type of draw (licensed by the Gambling Commission or local authority (lotteries and raffles) or draws exempt from the Gambling Act (prize draws) we can manage them all under one roof / operation.
We also have a wealth of knowledge and experience between the team embers that have experienced the pains at different levels and can reliant and support our draw hosts with a personalized touch.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
Well with our rapid growth we have managed to secure working with the whole of English football with partnerships with RFL and RFU.
To now also working with over half of the premiership football clubs and foundations
Completing our first acquisition of a competitor in the market during our funding round.
All in the space of just over 12 months of trading… Not bad?!
The next few years we are have a strategy to expanding into the global market launching into 21 countries and being the global lead as their number 1 choice as a fundraising platform.
We have a number of developments in the road map to support our hosts that will help with their fundraising needs.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
Key problem we experienced was time / money – being a startup launching in the middle of a pandemic was pretty tough…
The demand for the product and service was a lot higher but we needed to source funding to recruit and build faster which proved challenging through this period – thankful to our network we was able to accelerate conversations via digital conversations during our Angel/Seed round of funding.
Oh and opening a bank was pretty dam difficult!? Trying to open a business account during this period took many months and thankfully again the challenger banks (Monzo / Starling) was there to offer service else we would have had to waited between 5 – 6 months!
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
Are you a sports clubs, event organizer or charity looking to raise money?
Our platform helps create easy to use draws ensuring a minimum of half of the net proceeds go to good causes, with the remainder won as a cash prize or even more when experience prizes offered.
Looking for regular funding? Our platform encourages subscriptions so good causes can create regular income.
Host a draw today – https://playfundwin.com/host/
