A paragraph at the end of an article about Top Gear's Richard Hammond’s accident caught my eye this weekend: “Car enthusiasts have raised £60,000 in donations via justgiving.com for the air ambulance that took Hammond to hospital”. By the time I logged on to justgiving yesterday, the total had risen to £166,000.

In an environment where we’re wrestling with ways to broaden the reach of charities and break out of traditional approaches, here we have the best possible case study. One mad keen motoring buff, a member of a like-minded online community, sets up a fundraising page entitled ‘Get Well Soon Hamster’. Within hours, the Yorkshire Air Ambulance Service becomes relevant to an international audience of car enthusiasts who couldn’t be more different to Dorothy Donor in age, gender, lifestyle or attitude.

Relevance is key to fundraising and we usually start with obvious proximity to the cause, but this example has made me wonder whether a spot of quick, lateral thinking could open up new audiences. Of course Richard’s high profile media coverage was responsible for the scale of response, but it’s made me realise how effective interactive channels are when an opportunity for a timely appeal presents itself – a few carefully chosen digital posts could be powerful. And it shows that an ‘emergency’ appeal doesn’t necessarily have to be about emergency relief. The phenomenon we’ve seen here plays directly into the key principles of communicating with today’s donors – supporter-generated, personal, participative, dynamic.

Since I’ve been writing the fundraising total has exceeded £182,000: enough to buy another air ambulance… and not a proposition in sight!

Our best wishes go to Richard and his family.

Michelle Taylor