Record Numbers Sign Up To Promote This Year’s Oxjam Festival
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.”
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About Oxjam
Oxjam is the festival with a difference: all the fundraising music events are put on by ordinary people - from large-scale festivals to local sponsored busks. Since the launch of Oxjam in 2006, more than 36,000 musicians have taken part in almost 3,000 Oxjam events nationwide, raising over £1 million for Oxfam's work to end poverty.
Photos, audio clips and videos of a wide range of celebrities supporting Oxjam are available from www.oxfam.org.uk/oxjam/press.
About WeGotTickets
WeGotTickets is the leading ticketing agency in the UK for small to medium sized venues and promoters and currently works with over 3000 such organisations.
WeGotTickets has made it possible for promoters of all manner of events to benefit from advance ticket sales and now sells more than 500,000 tickets a year for a wide range of events; from art events and underground restaurants, to traditional live music shows. Indeed to cater for the growing demand for comedy tickets the company recently launched WeGotComedy.com, the UK’s only dedicated online ticket portal for comedy events.
Since its launch WeGotTickets has consistently pushed for innovation, transparency and best practice across the ticketing industry, with many of the company’s ideas becoming standard industry practice.
The company’s 10% maximum ticket commission rate has helped to lower fees across the business, whilst its pioneering paperless ticketing system has been a major factor in reducing the live music industry’s carbon footprint. The company has also been involved in numerous initiatives to help develop the grassroots live music industry and in 2009 launched an online forum where the company’s clients can network and share resources and knowledge in private.
Over the years WeGotTickets has been proud to work on a number of special campaigns with charities such as Oxjam, Childline and Warchild, and regularly donates a percentage of their booking fees back to these groups. In 2009 the company launched a unique feature allowing ticket buyers to quickly and easily make a donation to a featured charity whilst purchasing tickets.
Started in Oxford in the early noughties, the company was set up as a result of the founders being unable to sell advance tickets for one of their concerts at a venue that lacked a box office. Originally selling through their music merchandise website www.OxfordMusic.net, the WeGotTickets online box office was fully launched in 2002, selling tickets for The Zodiac (now O2 Academy) in Oxford and other venues.