Football tournament sees tombola colleagues match up for charity
tombola people recently competed in a five-a-side football tournament – the tombola Community Shield 2024 - at the Beacon of Light, raising over £1,700 for charity.
Myself and Declan Taylor organised the event for a few months prior, and the brand-new charity tournament was a huge success, with 44 people from across tombola coming together with a sporting spirit.
A total of £858 was raised and matched by tombola, taking the grand total to £1,716. The funds are to be split and donated to our UK charity partner for the year, the Children’s Heart Unit Fund (CHUF) - which does vital work to support children and families who receive treatment at the Children’s Heart Unit based at the Freeman Hospital and many other hospitals providing care for cardiac patients throughout the North of England – as well as Andy’s Man Club, a men’s suicide prevention charity, offering free support groups across the country and online.
Find out more about our UK and International charity partners of the year here.
The tournament took place on Friday 22nd March at the Beacon of Light in Sunderland, with 27 games played during a 4-hour window.
Declan, Game Engine Developer at tombola, had a little something to say about the planning:
"Our first choice of venue was obviously Wembley, but they had some international friendlies around the date we had in mind, so we settles on staying in Sunderland at the Beacon of Light...
After some initial planning, Ben and I built the tombola Community Shields website where people could sign up to play and assist in organising, promising a fun afternoon of football, sweepstakes and a raffle. We also used the website to share fixtures and results.
In order to try and increase a sense of involvement for those not taking part on the day, we ran a live stream in the office for people to watch each game. To supplement this and increase engagement in the sweepstake, we also built from our initial static website transforming it into a Vue.JS single page app with a pseudo backend supported by firebase's free tier. Just for good measure we included a widget from the GiveWheel page to show our progress towards our charity target - we smashed it!"
To add, I had such a great afternoon at the tournament and we’re already thinking about next year and how we can make this an annual thing!
Following the games, we all headed back to The Bonded Warehouse and held a mini awards event where we presented the tombola Community Shield to the winning team and used the stats we had tracked from the day to present awards including Player of the Match and the Golden Boot. We also had some participant voted awards such as Goal of the Day and Players’ Player.
It was important to us to support our local area throughout the day, so we used local suppliers where possible for both the tournament and social event including Vaux, Total Sport and the Beacon of Light. We were also lucky enough to receive donations of match tickets from Hartlepool FC and Gateshead FC to use as prizes for our raffle and help with our fundraising efforts, so big thanks goes out to any business that have supported us in making the event such a success.
Everyone involved in the day was able to use tombola’s ‘Donate a Day’ benefit, which allows employees to take a day out from their normal work schedule to volunteer their time and support a cause they’re passionate about.
Find out more about tombola’s benefits, perks and rewards here.
Photos: Leon Hutchinson.