The story
About The Zahra Trust
Founded in 2008, The Zahra Trust’s mission is to alleviate poverty among marginalised people across the globe. The charity strives for a global community where every individual enjoys unrestricted access to life’s necessities.
The charity uses the donations it receives in three ways. Firstly to deliver emergency aid to areas in need through their rapid response teams. This is done within the first 24 to 48 hours in response to humanitarian crises. Secondly, the charity also offers aid, food, water and financial support in the short to medium term. Then the final part of its services have a focus on the longer term. This is about bringing sustainable, long-term economic development to help bring people out of poverty on their own.
The need
Maximising Ramadan fundraising
Ramadan is a generous time of year and an important part of the annual fundraising efforts of The Zahra Trust – as it is for all good causes who receive Zakat.
With Ramadan being a key part of the charity’s fundraising for the year, The Zahra Trust was keen to ensure it maximised the amount raised while minimising the amount of time spent on admin. That way it could focus on value-add activities, like stewardship – to help nurture those supporter relationships.
The Zahra Trust uses donations to provide clean drinking water for those in need
The Enthuse approach
An intuitive fundraising experience
As part of their Ramadan fundraising activities in 2025, The Zahra Trust ran two ‘inflatable fun run’ fundraising events for children – a child-friendly equivalent of Tough Mudder. The aim was simple, for each participant to raise £1,500 to build a water well in Pakistan. This would be built in the family’s name with a plaque and the family would be sent a picture and a video of the finished product they helped to fund once built.
To raise money for the event successfully, it was important for the charity to be able to sign people up efficiently and to get them sorted with a fundraising page right away, which is where Enthuse was able to help.
Making use of Enthuse Event Registration capabilities, The Zahra Trust was able to sign-up participants ahead of time. Those taking part could fill in their details and buy a ticket for the event. The charity was also able to provide information about the event itself and the expectation to fundraise at this juncture. What’s more, the event registration page was branded to the charity, making sure that The Zahra Trust’s logo and colours were front and centre, helping to make them more memorable and encourage repeat donors further down the line.
One of the benefits of using Enthuse is that event sign-up and fundraising is integrated, making it an all-in-one process. This means it’s easier for charity staff to manage and a more seamless experience for the fundraiser. Upon registering for the event, every participant automatically had a fundraising page created for the inflatable run – so they could start raising money for the charity immediately.
Thanks to the automatic fundraising page creation, the charity’s staff were not required to spend their time chasing participants to set up a page – as had been the case for events in the past. Instead, The Zahra Trust’s staff could focus on stewardship and help drive greater fundraising totals. The charity did this by using Enthuse’s automated email capability to provide fundraisers with updates on their progress as well as words of encouragement. The charity also set up a WhatsApp group with the participants’ parents to communicate key details and create a sense of community.
The team at The Zahra Trust opted to pre-fill the ‘Story’ section for individual’s branded fundraising pages. This gave the participants one less job and meant the children could start fundraising with all the relevant information on their page right away. What’s more, with fundraising pages linking to the overall event fundraising page, it was easy for those taking part to see how they were ranking on the team leaderboard. This added an extra sense of gentle competition to incentivise more fundraising. The tangible goal of building a water well also gave the charity a good reason to ask any fundraisers who hadn’t hit their target if they wanted to top-up their total at the end.
Ramadan fundraising events play a pivotal role in the charity’s annual fundraising efforts
In addition to the inflatable runs, The Zahra Trust hosted an Eid Bazaar as part of its wider fundraising efforts for Ramadan. But unlike the year prior where vendors were charged a small fee to pitch up, this time they were told they had to fundraise for their spot – which led to much more being raised for their cause. Vendors simply set up a fundraising page via Enthuse and asked their networks to donate to The Zahra Trust so they could take part in the Eid Bazaar. This ended up being a brilliant community event, with approximately six hundred people turning up.
Overall, the different events made fundraising easy, engaged the community and put the charity’s brand at the heart of all fundraising activity. A great way to spread awareness as well as raise vital funds.
Our Ramadan fundraising events were seamless from every perspective and Enthuse played a huge part in that. We’d raised over £3,000 before I’d even started our stewardship efforts.
Salim Kassam – Global Fundraising Co-Ordinator, The Zahra Trust
Results
Raising £80,000 in Ramadan fundraising!
By making use of the Enthuse Fundraising and Events capabilities for its inflatable runs, The Zahra Trust was able to raise a fantastic £35,000 across the two events. The inflatable fun runs were a great way to engage families and provide them with a fun, well-organised event with a tangible goal – perfect for Zakat.
The charity is in the process of building 22 water wells in Pakistan with the money raised. What’s more, the families that helped to fund the project will have a plaque engraved on the well, dedicated to them as a thank you. This means participants and their donors can physically see the impact they made. An excellent way to show the outcome of the fundraising.
In addition, the Eid Bazaar asked people to fundraise rather than pay a token fee, raising a brilliant £45,000 in the process. Combined with other donations made to the charity during Ramadan, this helped to push the overall fundraising total to £80,000 – a fantastic result for the charity!
The Zahra Trust had a hugely successful Ramadan fundraising campaign in 2025 and will look to build on this in years to come.
The fundraising was very intuitive. All the participants knew what they were doing and how they were doing it from the start. It made our lives so much easier.
Salim Kassam – Global Fundraising Co-Ordinator, The Zahra Trust
