Money tree fundraiser: how to run one and what it raises

A money tree fundraiser is a branch, frame or board hung with money, and it hides two completely different fundraisers under one friendly name. One is a donation. The other is a prize game, and UK law treats them nothing alike.

I’m Kevin Durham, a charity auctioneer and event host who works the floor rather than the podium. Here is how to build one, what it brings in, and why I would never give it the slot I keep for a live pledge.

What is a money tree fundraiser?

A money tree fundraiser is a decorated branch or board that guests either attach money to or take a paid-for sealed envelope from. That one sentence covers two mechanics with different legal and tax consequences.

The donation version is the simpler of the two. You dress a bare branch in a pot, hang clips on it, and guests peg notes on through the evening. Nobody wins anything. The tree is a totaliser made of real money, which is why it works: a half-full tree asks a question of everyone who walks past.

The prize version is the one most people picture. The classic charity build uses identical envelopes, each holding a coin or note sealed in by a supporter and stapled at the corner to a cardboard tree. A picker pays a set price, chooses without feeling the envelope, and keeps what is inside. US fundraisers run a richer lottery tree on the same frame, mixing in scratch cards, small notes and wildcards such as double-or-nothing.

How do you set up a money tree at an event?

Decide which version you are running before anyone picks up a glue gun. The answer changes your paperwork. Then build it:

1. Get the tree high and lit. A branch in a weighted pot on a plinth, at eye level, near the door people come through. On a low table it disappears behind the first three guests.
2. Make the envelopes identical. Same size, same paper, same staple. If one bulges, that is the one everyone picks.
3. Price it in one number. £5 or £10 a pick, on a sign as big as the charity’s name. Discounts for multiple picks are fine.
4. Staff it with two people. One takes the money, one manages the tree.
5. Count it properly. The Code of Fundraising Practice wants cash counted and recorded in a secure place by two unrelated people where possible, never left unattended, banked promptly.
6. Show the running total. A fundraising thermometer beside the tree does more for the last hour’s takings than another sign.

Tell people where the money goes while you are at it. The Fundraising Regulator’s guidance on lotteries and raffles is blunt about donors knowing how much reaches the cause, and about not leaning on anyone.

Seeding a sealed-prize money tree

The sealed-prize version works because the room can see the odds and still cannot see inside the envelope.

Charities seed the tree one of two ways. Either supporters each fill an envelope in advance, so the contents are genuinely unknown to the organisers, or the charity fills them to a planned spread: plenty of small amounts, a handful worth more than the ticket price, and one or two headline envelopes the volunteers can shout about.

Keep those headline prizes donated rather than bought. Better arithmetic, and a condition of the exemption you are relying on.

Can you run a money tree fundraiser in a workplace?

You can, and the office version is the one most likely to break a rule nobody has read.

A prize tree among colleagues is a work lottery. Everyone taking part has to work at the same physical location. Tickets must be physical, one price, non-transferable, and never sold online, by email or by phone. The draw happens on the premises. You cannot profit from it: proceeds go to reasonable expenses and prizes, or to charity.

Hybrid colleagues at home are outside the exemption altogether, so a Teams link to a prize tree is not a work lottery at all.

A pinned-cash tree in the staff kitchen avoids all of that, because nobody wins anything. It is a collection with better staging.

Where does the Gambling Commission line sit?

The line sits at the moment someone pays for a chance at a prize. Under the Gambling Act 2005 a simple lottery is an arrangement where people must pay to take part, prizes go to members of a class, and the allocation relies wholly on chance. Paid picks from sealed envelopes meet all three tests.

That does not mean you need a licence. An incidental lottery is one of six lottery types you can run without a licence, and a prize tree at a gala fits it, within the conditions:

• the lottery cannot be the main reason for the event
• proceeds go to charity, not private gain
• physical tickets, sold at the venue while the event runs, never online or in advance
• up to £100 of proceeds on running costs and £500 on bought prizes, donated prizes unlimited
• no rolling a prize over

If the tree is the event, you are outside the exemption. The way to avoid a lottery altogether is a free draw, which needs a free entry route no more expensive and no less convenient than the paid one, promoted just as prominently. More administration than most tables are worth.

Can you claim Gift Aid on a money tree fundraiser?

Only on the version where nobody wins anything. HMRC is explicit that a raffle or lottery ticket payment is not a gift but a payment for the right to enter, and the size of the prize makes no difference. An envelope with a prize attached is a purchase, outside Gift Aid.

Pinned cash is different, and this is the bit most event teams miss. Anonymous notes have no declaration behind them, but the small donations scheme covers cash gifts of £30 or less with no declaration at all, at the same 25%, up to £2,000 a tax year. Your charity has to have claimed Gift Aid in the same year, the claim is capped at ten times that claim, and you need records of totals, collection dates and banking dates.

So a £600 money tree of pinned fivers and tenners can be worth £750. The same sum taken for envelope picks is worth £600 and nothing more.

What a money tree fundraiser raises, and what it costs

Do the arithmetic first. Sixty envelopes at £10 a pick is £600 across a whole evening. If you buy prizes from the proceeds, the exemption lets you spend up to £500 of that on them, so a tree stocked that way hands back most of what it took. Donated prizes are the difference between a fundraiser and an expensive piece of theatre.

Costs are small: a branch, a pot, envelopes, clips, signage and a cash float. Call it £50 and two volunteers.

The real ceiling is cash itself. UK Finance put cash at 8% of payments in 2025, 3.9 billion of them, against 45% in 2015. At a black-tie dinner in 2026, much of the room is carrying nothing to pin on your tree. Put a card reader beside it or accept you are fishing in a shrinking pool.

Money tree or live pledge for the same slot?

If those two are competing for the same half hour of your evening, run the pledge. This is not a close call and I will not pretend otherwise.

A money tree has a ceiling built into it: the number of envelopes times the price, minus the prizes. A live pledge has no ceiling, because the room sets the number. The Jigsaw Trust expected £14,000 from their live auction. It made £27,000, and a pledge nobody had planned for added £30,600 on top of that. At an MS UK event, where I told the room at the start exactly where every pound was going, the pledge raised £8,300, all of it to the charity. Both were powerful teams behind powerful charities, and the room gave to them, not to me.

The reason is structural. A pledge happens when the whole room is quiet, after a story nobody can look away from. The tree happens while people queue for the cloakroom. Whoever holds the room holds the total, and a tree in a foyer never holds the room. I have written up pledge drive against live auction in more detail elsewhere.

Where I would put a money tree in the running order

In the foyer, from arrival until the room sits down, and again after the auction. Never on stage.

My running order gives the stage to whatever needs the room’s full attention. I open with heads and tails to warm everyone up, let dinner breathe while volunteers sell for the charity raffle, then run the live auction and the pledge. A money tree, like a tombola, earns its keep in the gaps around those moments.

Used that way it is £400 or £600 the charity would not otherwise have had, plus a photograph they will use for years. Used as the centrepiece, it is a pretty way to leave money in the room.

If you want your running order to work as hard as your lots do, call 07596 851647 and we will talk it through.