The Truth About Charity Bingo

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. Combining fundraising for charity with another grand old British tradition, the game of bingo sounds like a great idea, but there are big obstacles to doing charity bingo online.

Why?  Well, while it’s possible to run a bingo fundraising event without a UK Gambling Commission licence, this ONLY applies to in person events with no online component.  To run any kind of bingo event involving remote communications, you need a licence.  And getting one is non trivial.

Over the last 15 years there have been many attempts by licensees to run online bingo sites for charity but unfortunately it never seems to end well. As we shall see, most of these sites either end up closing or dropping the charity affiliation (sometimes without making it clear to players that they have done so).

Even while all these charity bingo sites were in operation, the arrangements for donating money and the amount actually donated could vary wildly. 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.

• Types of Charity Bingo Site
• Charity Bingo – The Future
• Where To Play Charity Bingo

Types of Charity Bingo Site

• Charity bingo – sites owned and run by a charity
• Charity bingo – donating a percentage of deposits
• Charity bingo –  donating a percentage of profits
• Charity bingo – other schemes for donating
• Charity bingo – fundraising promotions and games at non charity bingo sites

Charity bingo – sites owned and run by a charity

If you play at a bingo site that is run by a recognised charity, 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. Nor do we expect to see any new ones launched in the future, because in the 2020s running a bingo site is no longer profitable enough to raise worthwhile amounts for the charity.

When I first started following charity bingo sites back in the 2010s, there was only one site of this kind in the online bingo world, the Irish site Rehab Bingo. At that time it was a busy, thriving bingo site run by Rehab Lotteries, a company within the Rehab Group (an overall not-for-profit organisation) whose purpose was to raise funds (thousands a month) for the group’s charitable activities. The Rehab Group works with thousands of people with disabilities in Ireland, Scotland and Poland, empowering them to lead independent lives. Indisputably a good cause, then.

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 still asserted that “a percentage of all funds raised on the site” would go to the charity but there was no indication as to what that percentage actually was, and since the Rehab Group is a Republic of Ireland charity there was no requirement for that information to be displayed (as it would for a UK charity).  In 2017 the Rehab Group ceased its lottery operations and in 2018 the bingo site changed its name to Rosy Bingo following an ASA ruling about the unsuitability of using the word rehab in connection with gambling. It no longer has any charity connection.

2014 also saw the launch of the Dragonfish bingo 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 a 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 that had taken place since its launch. This was 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 couldn’t make it work, who could?

Charity bingo – donating a percentage of deposits

Sites that do this are not actually officially affiliated with a charity, but promise to donate to charity whenever you deposit. 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 – in theory, that is.

In practice? Not so much! Take Charity Bingo, a Jumpman bingo site where there used to be a prominently displayed message on the home page stating that they give 10% of all deposits to their charity of the month. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Unfortunately, even when I first came across this site all those years ago following the link to find out what the charity of the month was and how much had been donated to which charities in previous months 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 was.

At the start of 2014 the message changed, to say that £1 would be donated to their charity of the month for every deposit of £20 or more – so basically, up to 5% of deposits. They also started to change the charities (at least semi regularly) and set up a JustGiving user profile showing what had been donated to the charities. The links from Charity Bingo often pointed to the wrong pages on JustGiving, though, so it wasn’t as clear as it could have been.

Still, the charity of the month was changed most months and donations were shown on JustGiving ranging from around £300 to around £900.

By early 2016 things had changed again. The £1 donations were allegedly being added to the Charity Bingo Heroes Pot which was going to be donated to a selected charity when the pot reached a point somewhere between £500 and £1000. But the pot never grew – it was shown as being £320 for a long time after that. It’s hard to believe that there were zero deposits of £20 or more for all that time and yet the site remained in operation.

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. And yes, it’s still in operation and still called Charity Bingo. Which is pretty misleading for prospective players.

Charity Bingo – donating a percentage of profits

There have been several online bingo sites that promise to donate a percentage of profits. While not actually run by charities, they do usually have some kind of official affiliation with the chosen charity.

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

Health Bingo

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 ran a number of non charity sites) in association with the Health Lottery. 20% of profits from this bingo site went to the good causes, as opposed to the 20% of proceeds (ticket sales) from the Health Lottery itself.

Health Bingo is long since closed and its successor, Health Games, is a Dragonfish bingo site which is not affiliated with the Health Lottery but instead promises to make a donation of 20% (up to £5) of each new player’s first deposit to NHS Charities Together. As the usual first deposit at Dragonfish is £10 and they are not even trying to acquire new players at the moment, this is worth very little.

Pink Ribbon Bingo

Pink Ribbon Bingo is a Dragonfish bingo site that was originally run in partnership with Daily Mail Bingo supporting 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 (probably after Breakthrough Breast Cancer merged with another charity to become Breast Cancer Now) the charity was quietly changed to Against Breast Cancer and although the Pinkometer on Pink Ribbon’s Community page continued to show 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 later redesigned and the Pinkometer disappeared, but up until 2024 (when the site changed hands again) they did still post news items from time to time about donations to the charity and run occasional fundraiser bingo games and promotions. That has all stopped now and although there is still a page on the site which talks about supporting the charity and it’s listed on the charity website as a corporate partner, there’s no further details about what (if anything) is currently being donated.

Postcode Bingo

Despite not having a name that was anything to do with charity bingo or dogs, the Dragonfish bingo site Postcode Bingo gave 10% of net proceeds to the Dogs Trust charity. The total donations from this site and Postcode Scratch (the associated scratchcard and slots site) were in excess of £100,000 but it turns out that almost all of this was from Postcode Scratch, especially from the Dogs Trust branded scratchcard where they gave 25% of net proceeds. Both sites are now closed and Dogs Trust runs its own raffles and prize draws..

Big Heart Bingo

Big Heart Bingo was a Cozy Games 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. This provided 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 the Super Bingo Network was absorbed by the Live Bingo Network in 2015 and the site had a design update, all mention of any actual donations to charity was quietly dropped. Nevertheless it continued to bill itself as “The Worlds’s Charity Bingo Site” and we were assured by the brand owner that the 50% was indeed still going to charity.

Big Heart Bingo closed in 2019, along with all other Cozy bingo sites after Entain took over the software.

Give Back Bingo

A relative latecomer to the charity bingo party, Give Back Bingo was a Stride Gaming/Daub Alderney charity bingo site launched at the end of 2016 promising to give all profits to the charity of the month with a minimum donation of £500.  It had no official connection with any of the charities. The charity donations were supposed to be documented via an associated Just Giving page and for a few months they were, but after that the page stopped being updated and the Give Back Bingo site showed the charity of the month only with no details of any donations. The charity component was dropped entirely when the site moved to different software in 2020.

My Charity Bingo

Finally there was My Charity Bingo which donated profits to charity, and (in theory at least) much more than anyone else. They started out with 100% of net revenue from each player’s account going to the Just Giving cause of their choice and even when this was reduced (presumably to cover costs) it was still a very meaty 75%. However, 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 in 2014.

Its later history was patchy. At one point it redirected to the aforementioned Charity Bingo and at another it was up and running 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 Dragonfish or Playtech were so generous!

Charity Bingo – other schemes for donating

And now we come to Bingo Giving, a Dragonfish bingo site which arguably has the most chequered history of any charity bingo site (or so called charity bingo site).

When I first came across Bingo Giving all the way back in 2013, there was 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 – and it is a big but – they only donated when a Bingo Giving player won a jackpot, so the sums raised (via an associated Just Giving page) were not particularly impressive.

It all started to go pear shaped when ownership of the site changed in November of that year. The messaging about charity remained on display, but visiting the Just Giving page for November’s charity of the month Ataxia UK revealed no donations at all.

I visited Bingo Giving again in March 2014 and a new charity of the month (Sport Relief 2014) was being shown, but Gus’s JustGiving profile (which at this point still documented 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.

When I next checked out Bingo Giving in 2015, Gus had been given the boot and replaced by Charlie the Charity Chimp. Charlie did seem to make occasional donations to charities but these amounted to under £200 a month. Although Charlie eventually caught up with what should have happened in April 2014, donating £140 to Sport Relief, there still remained the question of donations to Ataxia UK that were advertised on site but apparently not yet made..

When I next visited in Spring 2016, the charity of the month was shown as Great Ormond Street Hospital but I couldn’t find an associated JustGiving page and the accompanying graphic was for a different charity (from the previous year). Nor was there any record on JustGiving of any donations after the Sport Relief one (Charlie had a lot of fundraiser pages at this point but they were all out of date, and since then they have all been deleted along with Charlie’s profile).

Since then, Bingo Giving has changed ownership twice. First, it was acquired by Rank as part of their takeover of Stride Gaming. At that point all of the information and links about past and current charity donations was removed. Now, it’s run by the owners of the Dragonfish software, Broadway Gaming.

It’s still called Bingo Giving, there’s an illustration of a charity donation box on the home page and the blurb on the home page still includes “we give back to charities….with every bingo jackpot, we donate money to a charity”. But there’s nothing more specific than that, and unbelievably, the JustGiving page for the Ataxia UK donations which should have been made in November 2013 is STILL up in 2025 and STILL showing zero donations!  If I wanted to support a charity through playing bingo, this site certainly wouldn’t be my pick.

Charity bingo – fundraising promotions and games at non charity bingo sites

By far the most substantial sums raised for charity via the medium of online bingo come from special charity promotions by bingo sites that are normally run for profit. Even in the heyday of sites like Rehab Bingo and Tickety Boo Games, it was highly likely that you’d actually end up supporting charities to a greater extent by making a point of participating in charity events at a regular bingo sites than by playing at one of the overtly charity branded sites.

Nowadays, these special charity games are really the only fundraising activity you’ll find in the world of online bingo. The great thing about these promotions is their transparency – you know what the charity is, you know what portion of the proceeds is going to the charity and you can choose whether or not to participate.

Notable charity bingo promotions of the past

In the past, there have been some huge charity bingo promotions. For example, there was Foxy Bingo‘s Pink Ribbon Jackpots. 20% of all card sales for the series of £250 guaranteed jackpot games that ran several times a day throughout October 2013, were donated to Breast Cancer Campaign. Foxy ran this type of 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.

In the present day, due to the decline in popularity of the platform no Dragonfish sites would have a hope of raising anything like that much money. But there are still some big operators on other bingo software with ongoing charity partnerships.

Gala Bingo and 52 Lives

52 Lives is a “kindness charity” that focuses on changing one person’s life for the better each week (52 weeks a year hence the name). Some of the ways they have helped have been by paying for specialist medical equipment or rehabilitation programmes or by supplying basic necessities to people fleeing abusive relationships.

Gala Bingo raised more than £600,000 for the charity over a 4 year period via donations and special charity bingo games.  At the time of writing (June 2025) there are 12 penny bingo games every day (starting at 6.30pm) with 100% of the profits going to the charity.

Mecca Bingo and Carers Trust

Carers Trust is a network of more than 130 local carer organisations across the UK supporting more than a million unpaid carers of all ages.

Mecca Bingo has raised the best part of £2 million for Carers Trust over the course of 8 years of supporting the charity via the Rank Cares initiative. When you include the other Rank businesses that took part (Grosvenor Casinos on and offline and Mecca bingo halls) the amount is even more impressive – at one point they were raising a million pounds a year.
The £2 million has come from straightforward player donations and staff fundraising activities as well as from regular Rank Cares charity bingo games. They used to donate 50% of the profits from these to Carers Trust but it’s now been upped to 100% and is estimated to be worth around £13,000 a month to the charity.

Smaller operators

Small bingo sites have been known to run charity promotions as well, provided that the charity is happy to accept donations from a gambling site (some aren’t and we know of an embarassing case where a charity game was held in aid of the World Wildlife Fund but they refused the donation). For example, at the Jumpman site Tidy Bingo there used to be a weekly charity game in aid of Help For Heroes. Unfortunately, when the site was sold the new owners decided not to carry on with this charity game and the site has now closed.

Charity bingo – the future

I have to be honest here and say it doesn’t look good for charity bingo sites as such. The demise of Tickety Boo Games shows that online bingo in the UK is not a particularly effective way for a charity to raise money – and that was before changes to the taxation of bonuses ate even further into the profits of operators, ensuring that they no longer have much to spare for charitable donations.

It would be wonderful if the government introduced a tax break for charity bingo, or one of the software giants such as Playtech, Pragmatic Play or Gamesys sponsored a charity bingo site by supplying the platform free of charge, but due to poor public perceptions of the gambling industry it’s unlikely that either of these options would ever be seriously considered. Instead we have 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 2025, it’s down to pretty well nothing apart from good old Mecca Bingo and Gala Bingo.

Perhaps it is time for those of us who want to support any charities other than Carers Trust or 52 Lives via our online bingo play to cut out the middleman! You could:

• Go for the low tech option. Keep a piggy bank or jar on your desk or close to wherever you play, put in any loose change you have whenever you play, and empty it periodically into a charity box
• Celebrate a win by visiting Just Giving or Want2Donate and making a donation to the good cause of your choice
• Check out the Easy Fundraising browser extension. Once installed, when you spend money at a partner site a small donation to your chosen cause is made. Most of the partners are big e-commerce sites but they do have a few gambling sites listed
• There’s also something new coming soon, called Empower Your Play, which will focus on raising charity donations specifically from online gaming and gambling

Where to play charity bingo

As I said earlier, there really is not a great deal going on in terms of charity bingo these days apart from at Mecca Bingo and Gala Bingo.