Fundraising asks people to give.
This asks them to move.
Purposeful Miles is built by the two people behind Play Fund Win, on a simple observation from years of running fundraisers for clubs and charities: the campaigns that work are the ones people enjoy being part of. Not the ones that ask hardest.
Why this, and why now
Almost every fundraising tool in existence begins by asking somebody for money. It is a hard ask, it gets harder the more often you make it, and the people who care most are the ones you end up asking most often.
A draw works because it is not that. Somebody buys a ticket because the matchday is fun and there is a prize at the end of it, and the cause is funded as a consequence. Play Fund Win has spent years proving that shape at scale — clubs, schools, charities, parkrun, Wembley.
Purposeful Miles takes the same idea somewhere else: the thing people were already going to do.
A run before work. A cycle at the weekend. A walk with the dog. Those miles happen whether or not anybody is fundraising. Where a company has pledged an amount per mile, they can also add up to something for the charity that pledge names — and the person logging them has given nothing but the run they were having anyway.
That is the whole thesis. It is not a better way to ask. It is a way of not having to.
Who is behind it
Purposeful Miles is co-founded by Dean Lynn and Steve Lightfoot, who co-founded Play Fund Win together.
Dean Lynn
Co-Founder & CEO, Play Fund Win
Started Play Fund Win with Steve to take the spreadsheets and cash tins out of grassroots fundraising, and has spent the years since in club boardrooms and on matchdays watching what actually makes people take part.
Steve Lightfoot
Co-Founder & CRO, Play Fund Win
The other half of that founding pair, and the one who has sat across the table from most of the clubs, schools and charities Play Fund Win works with — which is where the idea for a fundraiser nobody has to be sold came from.
Backed by the Play Fund Win ecosystem
Purposeful Miles is a new and separate company, but it is not starting from nothing. It is being built beside a fundraising platform that already takes payments, splits them, holds balances and pays causes — so the parts of this that move real money can use rails that already work, rather than being rebuilt from scratch.
Clubs, schools and charities
Play Fund Win describes itself as a UK digital fundraising platform for sports clubs, schools and charities, running compliant 50/50 draws, raffles, 100 clubs and prediction games. It says 2,500+ organisations have used it and 250,000+ winners have been drawn.
Where it has run
By its own account: the EURO 2020 England v Italy draw at Wembley, the official Champions League Final draw, a BBC Strictly Come Dancing draw in 2024, and draws for the NHS, Manchester City in the Community, Crystal Palace, Brentford, Fulham, Newcastle United, Southampton, Burnley and Harlequins — and, for over seven years, parkrun's biggest fundraising platform globally.
The company
PLAY FUND WIN LTD, Companies House 13069447, based in Stamford, Lincolnshire. Purposeful Miles Limited (16125977) is a separate company; what the two share is the people, the experience and, in time, the fundraising rails.
Everything in this section is Play Fund Win's account of its own work, read from playfundwin.com/about . For its pricing, its totals and its full client list, read it there rather than here — those are its figures to state, and they change.
Where Purposeful Miles is today
Plainly, because a founding story is the easiest place on a website to overclaim.
Built and working
- A free account, and logging your own miles
- Challenges and leaderboards
- Badges and reward points
- Company pledges, recorded per period and settled to the charity they name
- Dashboards for a company and for a charity
- A public directory of the charities you can support
Not built yet
- Taking a payment — there is no payment provider here at all
- Strava for everyone (it is written, and in limited testing)
- Garmin (the connection is written; it is waiting on Garmin developer credentials)
- Other trackers — Apple Health, Fitbit, Polar, Wahoo
- Anything connecting miles to a Play Fund Win draw
Purposeful Miles Limited, registered in England and Wales, company number 16125977. The platform is free to use and we will never ask you for payment details.
Come and be early
It is free, it takes a minute, and the miles you log are yours whatever happens next.