News

Record Numbers Sign Up To Promote Oxjam

• 19th Jul 2010

With 3 months to go before the 2010 Oxjam Festival, a record 2600 volunteers have already signed up to stage their own fund raising events. Held in towns and cities across the UK, Oxjam encourages promoters and music fans to stage a club night or gig to raise funds for Oxfam.

Helping Oxjam reach that record number has been leading UK ticket agency WeGotTickets, a supporter of the charity for several years and who has encouraged more than 600 of their own customers to sign up to run Oxjam events.

Those volunteers will now receive training and advice in event promotion and management from Oxjam, with WeGotTickets creating a ‘How To…’ guide for first time promoters to ensure that their events run as smoothly as possible. For the third year running WeGotTickets will also be the preferred ticket vendor for the Oxjam festival providing wannabe promoters an easy way to sell advance tickets no matter how small their event.

Launched in 2006, the festival has seen more than 36,000 musicians play to an audience of over 750,000 people at almost 3,000 Oxjam events, raising in excess of £1 million to fight poverty around the world.

2009 was the festival’s biggest year to date with the likes of Editors, Basement Jaxx and Fatboy Slim playing special one off events at Oxfam stores and the staging of the first Oxjam city takeovers. On one day alone last year more than 2,000 musicians filled over 150 venues in more than 20 cities, from Cardiff to London, Aberdeen to Bath.

Said Steven Endersby, WeGotTickets “We've been really privileged to work as Oxjam's ticketing partner since the 2008 festival. Our customers have responded brilliantly each year- snapping up loads of tickets, particularly to last year's launch shows and takeover events, whilst donating thousands of pounds at the same time. Now we've given them the opportunity to get involved directly and organise their own Oxjam event, and to see over 600 of our customers volunteer is something we're really proud of.

We hoped when we were putting this together that our unique position within the ticketing market, working mainly with small to medium sized independent venues and promoters, would mean that our customers are exactly the type of pro-active, socially aware people that would want to get involved, and we're delighted to see so many of them volunteer.”

Stuart Fowkes from Oxjam said:
“With an extraordinary number of people – from first-time promoters to seasoned pros – signing up to put on a show for Oxjam, we’re well on course for a record year. The more shows that take place, the more money will be raised to help us fight poverty. We’ve already raised more than £1 million through Oxjam, so anything’s possible this year.

We Got Tickets are the perfect ticketing partner for us, as they make it easy for anyone to try their hand at promoting a gig, safe in the knowledge that they have an excellent, hassle-free ticketing system backing them up.”