We use cookies to analyse traffic and for ad measurement purposes, including for personalizing ads. Read Our Cookie Policy

igb-logo egr-logo

Charity Bingo Sites

Charity bingo sites are usually either affiliated with a named charity, or make regular donations to a series of charities via a charity of the month arrangement.  Some appear to do better at it than others, however, and in a few cases there has been room for doubt as to whether the monies were ever actually handed over.  In 2024, charity bingo sites are a dying breed because running a bingo site has got too expensive.

Charity Bingo Sites


The British have an extremely long standing tradition of charitable giving, going back for hundreds of years. Today there are over 180,000 registered charities and around half of all adults in the country donate; this very often comes in the form of fundraising events and activities such as raffles. It is hardly surprising that there have been several online bingo sites that decided to combine fundraising for charity with another grand old British tradition, the game of bingo.  But not all charity sites are the same – the arrangements for donating money, and the amount actually donated, can vary wildly.  Indeed, in practice some sites have ended up giving very little to charity and in many cases it has been impossible to tell how much, if anything, has actually been handed over.

  1. Sites which are owned and run by a charity
  2. Sites which donate a percentage of deposits to charity
  3. Sites which donate a percentage of profits to charity
  4. Other schemes
  5. Non charity sites running charity bingo games
  6. The future of charity bingo

Sites which are owned by a charity

With a site like this, you can be sure that all the net profits from the operation are actually going to the charity and none are going to line the pockets of the site operator.  Clearly this is the gold standard for charity bingo sites but although there have been at least two such bingo sites in the past, currently there are none.

When we first started following charity bingo sites several years back, there was only one site of this kind in the online bingo world, the Irish site Rehab Bingo which at that time was run by Rehab Lotteries, a company within the Rehab Group (an overall not-for-profit organisation) whose purpose is to raise funds (thousands a month) for the group’s charitable activities. The group works with disabled and socially marginalised people – over 50,000 of them in 200 centres all over the world – and this is certainly a good cause.  In January 2014, however, the ownership and operating arrangements for Rehab Bingo changed.  It moved from Virtue Fusion to Microgaming and the management was taken over by Broadway Gaming, the owners of Butlers Bingo.  The Rehab Bingo site said that “a percentage of all funds raised on the site” would go to the charity but we were unable to find out what that percentage was, and since it is a Republic of Ireland charity there is no requirement for that information to be displayed (as it would for a UK charity). A few years later the site changed its name and now no longer has any charity connection.

2014 saw the launch of the Dragonfish network site Tickety Boo Games which was owned by Marie Curie Charity Care.   This charity provides care and emotional support for patients with terminal cancer and their families, at home and in hospices, and all net profits from the site went to the charity making it our top choice amongst charity bingo sites.  Unfortunately, Tickety Boo closed its doors in Spring 2016; it seems the site was no longer a viable source of revenue for the charity, probably due to the regulatory and taxation changes since launch.  This is not only bad news for that particular site, but for charity bingo in general; if a well known, well respected and well run charity like that can’t make it work, who is going to be able to?

Sites which donate a percentage of deposits

The nice thing about supporting a charity via a bingo site that works in this way is that whether you win or lose, the charity still benefits.

At Charity Bingo, a Jumpman bingo site, there used to be a prominently displayed message on the home page which stated that they give 10% of all deposits to their charity of the month. Sounds great, but following the link to find out what the charity of the month was and how much had been donated was quite a disappointment, as only one charity of the month was listed.  Subsequent to that, the message on the home page changed to just saying “we give away some of our profits to charity” with the deal explained elsewhere on the site, but no link to say what the charity of the month was.

At the start of 2014 it was changed yet again – the new arrangement was for £1 to be donated to their charity of the month (which is now being changed at least semi regularly) for every deposit of £20 or more – so basically, up to 5% of deposits.  A JustGiving user profile showed what had been donated to the charities (although this was not as clear as it could have been as the links from Charity Bingo often pointed to the wrong pages on JustGiving) and up until August 2015 the charity of the month was changed most months and donations were made ranging from around £300 to around £900.  When we visited again in April 2016, the £1 donations were allegedly being added to the Charity Bingo Heroes Pot to be donated to a selected charity when the pot reached a point somewhere between £500 and £1000.  The pot showed at £320 for a long time after that (possibly because no-one was depositing).  The site has since changed hands and there’s now no information about any charitable donations or about what happened to the pot in the end.

Sites which donate a percentage of profits

The downside of a scheme like this is that the charity only gets any money if the bingo site makes money out of YOU – so if you win, the charity gets nothing.

Health Bingo arguably had the most reliable of these schemes.  It was powered by Bede Gaming and run by Intellectual Property and Software Ltd (who also run a number of non charity sites) in association with the Health Lottery.  20% of profits from this site went to the good causes, as opposed to the 20% of proceeds from the Health Lottery itself, but it is now closed.  Its successor, Health Games, makes a donation of up to £5 to NHS Charities Together from every first deposit instead.

Pink Ribbon Bingo, a site on the Dragonfish network, used to be run in partnership with Daily Mail Bingo. It used to support Breakthrough Breast Cancer. Despite the pink ribbon branding, it was not controlled by the charity, but was an official corporate partner donating 15% of gross profits as explained on the charity’s web site.  At some point the charity was changed to Against Breast Cancer and although the Pinkometer on Pink Ribbon’s Community page showed total donations of around £95,000 to breast cancer charities, there was no information about how much of that went to which charity, how much was being donated on an ongoing basis or even how frequently the Pinkometer was updated.  The site was subsequently redesigned and the Pinkometer is gone, but they do still post news items from time to time about donations to the charity and run occasional fundraiser bingo games.

Postcode Bingo was a Dragonfish network bingo site that gave 10% of net proceeds to the Dogs Trust charity, despite not having a name that was anything to do with charity bingo.  The total donations from this site and the associated scratchcard and slots site were in excess of £100,000 but it appears that almost all of this was from the slots site, especially from the Dogs Trust branded scratchcard where they gave 25% of net proceeds. Unsurprisingly, Postcode Bingo is also now closed.

At Big Heart Bingo, a Cozy-powered site on the Super Bingo network, players could choose from a selection of supported charities when they registered. 50% of net revenue from their account would go to the charity of their choice (which could not be changed apart from by closing the account and opening a fresh one). Big Heart did provide an avenue for relatively small charities, that wouldn’t have the wherewithal to open a bingo site of their own, to raise funds via bingo.  Unfortunately, when Big Heart’s bingo network was absorbed by the Live Bingo Network during 2015 and the site had a design change, all mention of any actual donations to charity was quietly dropped although it still billed itself as “The Worlds’s Charity Bingo Site” and we were assured by the operator that the profits were indeed going to charity.  Big Heart Bingo closed along with all other Cozy bingo sites after Entain took over the software.

There was yet another site called My Charity Bingo which donated profits to charity, and (in theory at least) a lot of them – originally 100% of net revenue from each player’s account went to the Just Giving cause of their choice (now 75%), but despite being aimed at UK players it was licensed and regulated in Curacao and therefore banned by the UK Gambling Commission from advertising in the UK.  Nor did it apply for a UK licence when that became the requirement.  Subsequently the domain name redirected to Charity Bingo but later it was up and running again for a while, in euros and geo-locked so as not to accept any registrations from the UK.  While the choice of a platform not licensed for the UK seems bizarre, this was clearly done because the software and network were supplied free of charge by Aberrant / Functional Games.  If only 888 or Playtech were so generous!

Other schemes

Bingo Giving, on the Dragonfish network, originally had a prominently displayed message from Gus the Giving Gorilla about the charity of the month, and they did seem to change it relatively often, but they only donated when someone won a jackpot, so the sums raised (via an associated Just Giving page) were not particularly impressive.  Ownership of the site changed in November 2013 and the messages about charity remained on display, but visiting the Just Giving page for November’s charity of the month revealed no donations.

As of March 2014 a new charity of the month (Sport Relief 2014) was being shown, but Gus’s JustGiving profile (which showed all the donations to charity since the site was set up in 2009) did not have a page for it and there were still no donations to Ataxia UK which was nominated as the charity of the month before the site changed hands in November.

Fast forward to 2015 and Gus had been given the boot and replaced by Charlie the Charity Chimp.  Charlie does seem to make occasional donations to charities but these amount to under £200 a month and there still remains the question of donations to Ataxia UK that were advertised but apparently not (or not yet, at least) made.  Charlie did eventually donate £140 to Sport Relief in April 2014.  When we visited in Spring 2016 the charity of the month was shown as Great Ormond Street Hospital but there did not seem to be an associated JustGiving page and the accompanying graphic is for a different charity (from the previous year).  There does not appear to be any record on JustGiving of any subsequent donations (Charlie has lot of fundraiser pages but they are all out of date).  The site is now owned by Rank and there’s no longer any information on it about any charity donations.

Give Back Bingo, a Stride Gaming/Daub Alderney charity bingo site launched at the end of 2016, promised to give all profits to the charity of the month with a minimum donation of £500.  Again, this was supposed to happen via an associated Just Giving page and for a few months it did, but after that they just showed the charity of the month on site.  The charity component was dropped entirely when the site moved to different software in 2020.

Non charity sites running charity bingo games

Many of the big bingo sites such as Gala Bingo and Mecca Bingo  run promotions from time to time in the course of which large sums (sometimes hundreds of thousands) are given to charity. It could be that by having an account there, and making sure you participate in the charity events, you’ll actually end up supporting charities to a greater extent than by playing at one of the overtly charity branded sites.  You can find out about any current charity bingo events on our monthly promotions page but sadly these days there are hardly any.

A good example of this type of promotion was Foxy Bingo‘s October 2013 Pink Ribbon Jackpots. 20% of all card sales for the series of £250 guaranteed jackpots games that ran several times a day throughout the month, were donated to Breast Cancer Campaign. Foxy ran a similar promotion for Breast Cancer Awareness month for many years.  Another very generous charity initiative was the Hearts of Gold promotion which ran over several months during 2015 at Wink Bingo.  A very respectable £57,000 was raised from this series of charity games, for Cancer Research UK via the Peter Andre Fund.

Probably the biggest charitable contribution from any real money bingo site came from Mecca Bingo in the form of their regular Rank Cares charity games with 50% of the profits going to Carers Trust.  The Rank Cares initiative (which ran at online and offline Grosvenor casinos and Mecca bingo halls as well as at the bingo site) raised around a million pounds a year for the charity over just two years and this makes the amount raised by most charity bingo sites look very small.

Small sites sometimes do their bit for charity as well – at the Jumpman site Tidy Bingo there used to be a weekly game where the profits went to Help For Heroes.  Unfortunately, when the site was sold the new owners decided not to carry on with this charity game. The site has now closed.

The future of charity bingo

We have to be honest here and say it doesn’t look good.  The Point of Consumption tax that was introduced in the wake of the new UK licensing regime, and the further changes announced in the 2016 Budget, have eaten into the profits of bingo sites to the extent that they no longer have much to spare for charitable donations, and the demise of Tickety Boo Games shows that online bingo is not a particularly effective way for a charity to raise money.  We would love to see the government introduce a tax break for charity bingo, or one of the software giants such as Playtech, Pragmatic Play or Gamesys sponsoring a charity site by supplying the platform free of charge, but neither of these seem at all likely.  We’ve been left with an increasingly poor (and in some cases frankly dodgy looking) selection of charity bingo sites and an increasingly few and far between selection of charity bingo promotions – and in 2024, it’s down to pretty well nothing.

Perhaps it is time for those of us who want to support charities via bingo play to cut out the middleman by keeping a piggy bank next to the computer, putting in any loose change when we play, and emptying the piggy bank periodically into a charity box!   Or after a win, why not visit Just Giving or Want2Donate and make a donation to the good cause of your choice?

If there’s a particular cause you want to support, another option is to use Easy Fundraising.  This can be installed on your browser and when you spend money at a partner site (including some bingo sites) a small donation to your cause is made.

Sue Dawson
Head of Content

Sue Dawson has been writing about (and playing) online bingo and slots since 2013, putting her unique spin on everything.  She has written pieces for iGaming industry news sites, appeared on panels at industry events and on podcasts, helped to judge industry awards and is a member of industry think tank Ampersand Plus.

8
Notifications

New UK customers only. 125 free spins on Big Bass Bonanza (£0.10 per spin) credited after successful £10 deposit and £10 stake on Casino, Vegas or Live Casino. No wagering requirements on free spin winnings. Debit Card deposit only (exclusions apply). This offer is valid 7 days from the new account being registered. 18+ BeGambleAware.org. Bet the Responsible Way. Full terms apply. *18+ BeGambleAware.org Please play responsibly #ad

18+. New customers only. Deposit and spend £5 on bingo to receive £25 Bingo Bonus (accept & wager bonus 3x within 7 days), 25 Free Spins playable on selected games only (accept & wager winnings 30x within 48hrs) & 25 Bingo Tickets playable in select bingo rooms only (accept within 7 days, 0x wagering.) Bingo games must be completed to activate bonuses. Debit cards only. Offer Ends 31/05/2024. T&Cs apply. *18+ BeGambleAware.org Please play responsibly #ad

New UK and IRL customers only. Deposits through debit cards only. 40x wagering requirement on bonus, within 7 days, on eligible slot games. Winnings from bonus capped at £500. Spins available upon completion of bonus. Full T&Cs apply. *18+ BeGambleAware.org Please play responsibly #ad

Automatically credited upon deposit. Cancellation can be requested. First Deposit Only. Min. deposit: £10. Game: Book of Dead, Spin Value: £0.10. WR 60x free spin winnings amount (only Slots count) within 30 days. Max bet is 10% (min £0.10) of the free spin winnings amount or £5 (lowest amount applies). Spins must be used and/or Bonus must be claimed before using deposited funds. First Deposit/Welcome Bonus can only be claimed once every 72 hours across all Casinos. Bonuses do not prevent withdrawing deposit balance. Bonus Policy applies. *18+ BeGambleAware.org Please play responsibly #ad

New customers only. Deposit and stake £10 on bingo to qualify within 7 days of initial deposit. Some prizes have wagering requirements and expiry dates. Country Restrictions Apply. See full T&C for more detail. *18+ BeGambleAware.org Please play responsibly #ad

18+, New customers only, register, deposit and stake £20 on Big Bass Bonanza within 7 days, and claim 110 Free spins on Big Bass Bonanza. Free spins expire 30 days after credited. Ends 30/06/24 at 23:59 GMT. Full T&Cs Apply. *18+ BeGambleAware.org Please play responsibly #ad

18+. New Bingo players only. Deposit required. Spend £5 or more on Bingo tickets to get a £25 Bingo bonus. 2x wagering requirements apply to bonus. Accept bonus within 14 days. Bonus valid for 30 days. Certain deposit types excluded. Player restrictions and T&Cs apply. *18+ BeGambleAware.org Please play responsibly #ad

New players only, must enter code KITTY in Bingo Lobby, claim once only, min wager £5, real cash wagers on bingo only (Excl PayPal), valid 7 days, bonus & wins playable on Bingo (excl. BOB & BGT), 3xWR. Full T&C apply. *18+ BeGambleAware.org Please play responsibly #ad