People's Postcode Lottery

The People’s Postcode Lottery is the first charity lottery to be launched in Scotland. It represents a unique concept whereby players play with their postcode and win with their neighbours, while supporting some of Scotland’s most worthwhile causes.

It is a subscription-based lottery and every week there are guaranteed prizes of up to £30,000 for people all over Scotland. The first draw for the People’s Postcode Lottery took place on the 4th January 2008.

Novamedia BV, an international charity lottery operator who have successful charity lotteries in both the Netherlands and Sweden, founded the Postcode Lottery concept. The Scottish office consists of a team of ten, which should grow to fifteen by the end of the year. The head office is located in Edinburgh.

After six months of operation in Scotland, 60,000 tickets and over 1,800 winning tickets have won more than £1.1 million. These winners have come from all over Scotland, from Stornoway in the North, to Stranraer in the Southeast.

Charities

20% of the revenues received from People’s Postcode Lottery ticket sales go to Scottishcharities. More importantly though the People’s Postcode Lottery provides unrestricted fundswhich charities tend to prefer.

The three charities that currently benefit from the People’s Postcode Lottery are active in health, children’s rights and nature, and all money funds raised in Scotland will remain in Scotland. The first three charities are Scottish Wildlife Trust, Maggie’s Cancer Care Centres and CHILDREN 1ST. In the first six months the People’s Postcode Lottery has raised over £650,000 for these three Scottish charities.

As the lottery grows, more charitable partners will be brought on board to benefit from the funds raised. The People’s Postcode Lottery is also considering setting up a Fund to manage requests from smaller charitable organisations in Scotland.

Ambassadors

Furthermore, the People’s Postcode Lottery is proud to have regional, national and internationally renowned celebrities as its Ambassadors. All recognise the importance of creating a better world and are pleased to associate their names with a lottery that aims to do just that. Current ambassadors are: Kaye Adams, for CHILDREN 1ST; Dawn Steele for Maggie’s; and actor John Michie for Scottish Wildlife Trust.

Postcode Challenge

The People’s Postcode Lottery is sponsoring and funding the ‘Postcode Challenge’ a quiz show running every Monday night at 8pm on STV. The series is hosted by one of the UK’s most popular presenters, Carol Smillie. The quiz is based around multiple questions covering areas including history, music, natural sciences, environment, lifestyle and well-being as it affects Scottish communities. Teams of six people compete for significant cash prizes. The teams of six are made up of contestants who are neighbours and ideally live in the same street, road or avenue, as demonstrated by sharing the same or similar postcode.

There have been 29 episodes of Postcode Challenge to date. The first episode aired on 12thNovember last year. Each week, around 320,000 viewers tune in to watch PostcodeChallenge, with a peak audience of nearly 470,000. To date, 116 teams and 696 participantshave competed on Postcode Challenge.

Over the years, Novamedia has worked with a number of leading TV production companiesand public and commercial broadcasters to support the promotion of their Lotteries. It was
Novamedia who inspired and paid Endemol to produce TV game shows such as ‘Deal or NoDeal’ and ‘One Against a Hundred’, which are now viewed by millions of people around the
world.

External links

* [http://www.postcodelottery.com/ People's Postcode Lottery]
* [http://www.novamedia.nl/ Novamedia BV]
* [http://www.gbgb.org.uk/ The Gaming Board for Great Britain]
* [http://www.goodfund.org The GoodFund]
* [http://www.postcodeloterij.nl/ National Postcode Loterij NL]