The United Kingdom fell out of the top 20 most generous counties in the world in 2023, but you wouldn’t know it based on funds raised at London’s largest marathon and half marathon events.
Both the TCS London Marathon and Tommy’s London Landmarks Half Marathon attracted record funds for charity in 2024 through their peer-to-peer fundraising programs.
The TCS London Marathon raised £73.5 million in 2024 which brought its estimated donation total since 1981 to £1.3 billion. Approximately 75% of the 53,000 runners who finished the marathon in 2024 were linked to a cause, estimated Sarah Ball, head of charities for London Marathon Events Ltd. The charity team worked directly with 1,400 nonprofits and they know hundreds more fielded fundraising runners, Ball said.
Tommy’s London Landmarks Half Marathon topped £14.7 million in donations in 2024 which brought its total raised for nonprofits to £50 million since 2018. Last April Tommy’s worked with 532 charity partners and 14,568 charity runners hit the course – 74% of the total runners participating, said Director of Landmark Events Lia Fyles.
The two events are very similar in having robust charity programs. The marathon is owned by London Marathon Events which has a parent charity, The London Marathon Foundation. The half marathon was created as a fundraising offshoot of Tommy’s, the UK’s leading pregnancy and baby charity. Tommy’s receives revenue primarily from entry fees people pay to participate, the sale of entry places to charity partners and fundraising done by entrants directly supporting its work.
Whereas many charities struggle these days to attract donors, in a sense both of these endurance fundraising programs have the opposite problem: too much demand for charity program entries.
In the run-up to this year’s event, recalled Fyles “we received a staggering number of applications from charities.”
“We therefore had to introduce a new way of allocating places to ensure all charities that made an application received places in the fairest possible way,” she said. “We carefully managed the process, balancing valuing charities who have supported us for several years and their ambition to grow their place numbers, as well as remaining accessible to charities who are new to the LLHM.”
Fyles said she expects more than 16,000 runners representing 681 charity partners to raise £16 million when they tackle the 13.1 mile course on April 6. Charity participants are forecast to represent 81% of all runners in 2025, a seven-percentage point increase.
Designing a new way to allocate charity runner spots (called a bond scheme by the English) has been a complex multi-year initiative for the TCS London Marathon. On the one hand, organizers wanted to provide fundraising opportunities for charities that had been shut out in the past because participating charities would almost never give up their slots. On the other hand, they didn’t want to suddenly revoke entries from incumbent charities that had come to rely on their allocations of bibs to raise substantial amounts.
“After extensive consultation with the charity sector, we announced in 2021 that we would review the Bond Scheme terms and, from 2026 open it up for the first time in 20 years to new charities who hadn’t previously secured bonds,” explained Ball.
The new Charity Bond Scheme began accepting applications in 2024 for the 2026 through 2029 editions of the marathon. Incumbent bond holders retained the right to renew their packages which were slightly reduced in the number of entries they contained to make room for new charities to participate.
The new system enabled organizers to provide packages of multiple entries to nearly 800 more charities than had participated in the past, Ball said. They also brought back a program called the TCS London Marathon Charity Ballot for the first time in five years which offered single entries to 500 more UK-registered charities, she said.
Run in or observe either of these events and it is clear that charity participation is at their cultural cores – the numbers of people running in costume and enormous charity-organized cheering sections along the route are spectacular. The two charity programs share a dedication to what Ball called providing “some happiness and achievement in a troubled world.”
Even the most well-intentioned of organizations are not immune from criticism. It will be fascinating to see how their communities react to organizers’ efforts to evolve how they divvy up access to the amazing fundraising machines they have built.