The aim of Charity Aid is to raise vital funds for various charities.

At the time of making these notes our Charity Aid project has been up and running for five months and you can see the result of every collection we’ve held on this website. It adds up to an amazing £50,000.

Even though we have, in other forms, been collecting for almost a decade, the Charity Aid project has added to our knowledge in a very big way and taught us a lot of lessons.

Beforehand, we held up to 40 fundraising events every year but Charity Aid can, ideally, hold that many events in a month.

Originally we only collected for one charity, but we soon found that other charities wanted to be involved. When we opened the door to other charities and decided to hold regular collections for them, this really turned our idea into a major project.

Such a project brings with it its own particular problems and challenges. Fortunately, the experience we’ve gained over the last ten years has helped us to deal with those challenges and put everything we have learned – and are still learning – to good use.

We started off Charity Aid on 1st June 2011. In a few months Charity Aid has developed into something far different than we envisaged. It has been a difficult task and we have experienced bad days as well as good ones. But both our successes and those days which haven’t been so good, have taught us so much.

In the first month of the project – June 2011 – we raised £2,000 but in the second month we raised £10,000.

Charity Aid has no financial targets. We are always happy with whatever we collect, but obviously we are even happier when we have successes. For Christie’s we had many successes and raised over £3,000 in one day at Bolton.

We also got very near to this total on several other days.

We are sure that when Charity Aid is running at full power – in Summer 2012 – we will achieve a lot more. But we have been delighted with some of the successes we’ve had so far. For example to collect over £700 on a Sunday in Chester was some achievement. And to collect £1,488 in Preston and £1,795 in St Helen’s was quite impressive. Other surprisingly good results have been to collect £1,044 on a weekday in Bury and over £700 on a weekday in Accrington and over £500 on a weekday in Chorley.

We have also gone further afield with our collections than we did previously. For example, we collected £1,290 in Sheffield’s Meadowhall Centre, £680 in Bradford, £649 in Halifax, over £500 in Leeds and we have ventured into collections at other unusual sites such as Ikea at Warrington where we collected £565. But we still badly need more volunteer collectors, office staff and singers. So if you know someone who can help us, please let them know that we are awaiting their call.

We are also desperate to recruit singers/buskers who we will pay expenses to perform in the street at daytime gigs, in Northern England.

If you can’t do it maybe you know someone who can so please get them to contact us.  They could be keen amateurs or retired club singers.  We have gear so they don’t have to bring anything unless they want to.

Over the last eight years we have learned a lot about how and where to fundraise.

We have held events all over the North West of England which have been very successful and have built up a very good relationship with the councils with which we book events and also the shopping centres involved.

Every event we hold has to be arranged with a council and sometimes also a shopping centre manager and a town centre manager. There is a lot of paperwork involved for which we need administration staff.

The reputation that Songs for Christie’s built up, led to it being approached by other charities and, where possible, we willingly gave our support by holding events for them.

Over the last eight years we have held fundraising events for Barnardo’s, local hospices, the British Heart Foundation, Guide Dogs For The Blind and foster children. We have also held events for Scope, the charity for people suffering from cerebral palsy.