£50 for 50 Campaign

The Marketors' Trust celebrated its 50th Anniversary in 2026. To mark it, we published one giving story a day for fifty days, from 1 August to 19 September 2026. All fifty are collected here.

The Marketors' Trust is the charity of the Worshipful Company of Marketors and for fifty years it has given to charities and good causes in line with its three main aims: inspiring excellence in marketing, supporting the disadvantaged, and caring for Marketors in need.

That giving takes several forms. The annual Marketors' Charity Grants programme gives grants to smaller charities to fund marketing campaigns that advance their causes, while through the Awards committee the Trust supports marketing education, from apprenticeships to prizes for the best doctoral theses and CIM students, and teaching excellence awards through the Academy of Marketing. As the charity of a Livery Company we also support the City and the Mayoralty's charitable initiatives, our Armed Forces affiliates and our affiliate church of St Bride's, as well as looking after Marketors who may have fallen on hard times.

The thread running through all of it is marketing, because most small charities have a service that works and no reliable way of telling people it exists, and most young marketers need someone to open the first door. Over fifty days we told fifty stories of what happens when that gap is closed, from a film showing what a small grant does for a young person leaving care, to a helpline reaching farmers before the pressure builds, to a free outdoor yoga movement that had never spent a penny on marketing and grew its attendance by almost a third in a single season, to apprentices pitching ideas to cut food waste, and a church on Fleet Street that has been the Company's friend from its first day.

They are all collected below, so read them in order or dip in wherever you like. Together they are our answer to the question we have been answering for fifty years: what happens when good marketing is put to work for good causes.

🎵 Story 1 of 50

Fifty years of giving starts here. Each year our Master chooses a charity close to their heart. In 2016, Master David Pearson chose Live Music Now, founded by the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, and the Trust's gift helped bring live music to people who rarely get to hear it. Its musicians reach more than 55,000 people a year: in care homes and hospitals, in Memory Cafés for people living with dementia, and in specialist schools for disabled and autistic children.

🍲 Story 2 of 50

Every fortnight in Northampton, nearly 100 families collect a food parcel from the United African Association, the largest African food bank in the town. Not just tins and pasta, but culturally appropriate food alongside the essentials that are easy to overlook when money is tight, like nappies and baby food. In 2022 the Marketors' Trust gave £2,500 to help the charity raise its profile and bring in more donations, so more families could be fed.

🎨 Story 3 of 50

Behind every museum, gallery and theatre is someone working hard to bring in an audience. The Arts Marketing Association has helped them do exactly that since 1993. A grant from The Marketors' Trust funded AMA membership for 27 arts, culture and heritage organisations across London, museums, galleries, theatres, even an orchestra, that couldn't otherwise afford it, giving their teams the training to reach new and often overlooked audiences.

💛 Story 4 of 50

Dené, known as Nai, was a daughter, sister, friend and mother who dreamed of becoming a psychotherapist. She struggled to find the mental health support she needed, and in 2017 she died by suicide, aged 22. Her mother, Gem, founded Nai's House in her memory, to give young people the support Nai couldn't find. A grant from The Marketors' Trust helped it grow its supporters, reach more young people, and stand beside families who have lost someone they love.

❤️ Story 5 of 50

Around one in a hundred babies in the UK is born with a heart condition, and some families face the hardest loss of all. In 2023 the Marketors' Trust helped the Children's Heart Federation launch a new online memorial for the children they've lost, a place to leave a dedication and plant wildflower seeds in their memory. The campaign raised more than £6,000 and won national coverage.

💡 Story 6 of 50

Before the first job or the first pay cheque, a team of students at City of London School set up a real company, '5p Richer', and marketed it well enough to catch the eye of City livery marketers. In 2016 The Marketors' Trust gave them a £500 Young Enterprise award, early encouragement for the marketers of the future.

💬 Story 7 of 50

For someone in a mental health crisis, the hardest step is often the first: asking for help from someone who truly understands your world. Jewish Action for Mental Health offers culturally sensitive therapy and support to the Jewish community in Greater Manchester. In 2024 the Marketors' Trust funded the marketing behind its big fundraising appeal, which went on to raise around £72,000 from nearly 1,500 donors.

🏡 Story 8 of 50

"I've lived here ten years and I didn't know the community centre was there." It sits on the main road, with a huge sign outside. That was the challenge facing Sherburn & Villages Community Trust, which runs a community centre, a library and outreach projects for around 19,000 people, all on volunteer time and with no marketing budget. In 2025 a £2,500 grant from the Marketors' Trust let them test targeted local ads for the first time, reaching people who never knew they were there, for as little as 3p a click.

🌾 Story 9 of 50

For a farmer facing a hard season, the loneliest part is often not knowing that help is there. Shropshire Rural Support offers confidential help to farmers and rural families across the county, reaching people before the pressures of rural life become overwhelming. This year a £10,000 grant from the Marketors' Trust, our top award, funded a series of short films to tell that story, with the charity's own volunteers giving the voiceovers so every word rings true to the community it serves.

💙 Story 10 of 50

Up to half of all women live with pelvic girdle pain during or after pregnancy, and far too many are told it is just part of having a baby and sent away to endure it. It isn't. PGP is a treatable joint problem, and with the right hands-on therapy it can be eased, often quickly. The Pelvic Partnership, a small charity run by volunteers who have lived through it themselves, exists to get that message out. In 2022 a £2,500 grant from the Marketors' Trust funded an awareness campaign to help more women find effective treatment sooner, rather than waiting in pain.

👶 Story 11 of 50

The early weeks with a new baby can be some of the hardest and loneliest of a parent's life, full of questions about feeding, sleep and simply coping, often with no one to ask. Baby Umbrella is there for exactly that. The award-winning West Kent charity gives new and expectant parents free, skilled support, from breastfeeding and feeding help to a listening service for when it all feels overwhelming, and it reaches more than 1,000 families a year. In 2025 a £2,500 grant from the Marketors' Trust funded its 'Inform & Educate' campaign, helping even more families find that support when they need it most.

🫶 Story 12 of 50

When you are struggling with how you feel about your body, the thing that helps most is often not a leaflet or a waiting list, but one person who truly gets it. Been There is built on exactly that. Its free app connects people worried about body image with a trained mentor who has been through it themselves and come out the other side, someone who understands and is there for them. Founded by Tessa after her own long struggle, the charity turns hard-won experience into hope for someone else. The Marketors' Trust backed Been There in 2022, and again in 2023, a rare repeat award, to help even more people discover they are not alone.

🧘 Story 13 of 50

Every Sunday morning from May to September, in parks across England and now Scotland, thousands of people roll out a mat, or just a towel, and move through an hour of free yoga in the open air. No booking, no fee, all abilities welcome. Park Yoga has grown to around 6,000 people a week this way, and until recently it did it all on a marketing budget of exactly zero. A £2,500 grant from the Marketors' Trust let it run its first ever adverts, and attendance jumped 29% in a season. Better still, it proved to the charity's own board that marketing was worth it, so the impact keeps growing year on year.

📣 Story 14 of 50

Give a room full of apprentices a real problem and a marketer's toolkit, and see what they do with it. In 2016 the Marketors' Trust set students at London's Westminster Kingsway College a challenge under a simple banner: marketing for good is good marketing. Working in teams, they pitched marketing ideas to cut food waste and help tackle obesity, thinking like professionals but aiming their skills at something that mattered. The Trust funded the prize for the winning team, early recognition for the marketers of the future, and proof that the craft is at its best when it is pointed at real problems.

🌍 Story 15 of 50 

In a village in Uganda, a fourteen-year-old holding her own baby is often told her future is already decided. Act4Africa refuses to accept that. Its Strong Mothers' Club stands with vulnerable young mothers aged 14 to 24, part of a charity founded 25 years ago on a simple belief: you help best by helping directly. The Marketors' Trust's £10,000 grant funded Act4Africa's first donor-acquisition campaign, winning the regular givers who keep that work going.

✍️ Story 16 of 50 

The Shine School Media Awards are open to every pupil in the UK's secondary schools, rewarding great communication in print, digital, photography, cartoons and podcasts, skills that matter at school and for future employment. The challenge for this small, underfunded charity was reaching every school. The Marketors' Trust enabled it to pay for direct marketing to all UK secondary schools, and the result was more schools entering and many more pupils taking part.

🎓 Story 17 of 50

Long before charity grants and apprenticeships, the Marketors made a bigger bet. In 1983, only a few years after the Company was formed, it funded a Chair in Experimental Marketing at London Business School, its first major education initiative and a statement that marketing deserved to be taken as seriously as any science. Four years of funding to help a young discipline take root.

🎓 Story 18 of 50

A First from Cambridge and a pull towards marketing, and towards the part it could play in a more sustainable future. What Francisca Posada-Brown needed was a way in. The £10,000 Cass Business School Marketors' Scholarship gave her one: a place on a Master's, a dissertation shaped with the Marketors, and a mentor she still speaks to today. She has since built a career across three continents.

🍛 Story 19 of 50

Leaving the Armed Forces is one of the hardest transitions there is, and for many veterans the challenge is turning years of leadership and skill into a CV a civilian employer understands. As part of its support for the *Company's Armed Services* affiliates, the Marketors' Trust donated to the Lord Mayor's Big Curry Lunch, funding two veterans onto the LifeWorks programme of career coaching, employment support and training. The Big Curry Lunch is a City institution: 1,650 guests at Guildhall, no seating plan, senior figures queuing side by side, more than £4.2 million raised for veterans since it began.

🤟 Story 20 of 50

For many deaf and hard-of-hearing people, the hardest barrier isn't sound, it's information: knowing where to turn, and finding it in a language that works for them. Founded in 1885, Warrington & District Society for Deaf People has been closing that gap for nearly 140 years, from a Deaf Café to a BSL choir. A £10,000 Marketors' Trust grant funded an accessible information hub to reach further and lift isolation, bridging the hearing and deaf worlds.

🎓 Story 21 of 50

In 2023 the Marketors' Outstanding Contribution to Marketing Thesis Prize went to Dr Karen Middleton, a late-career researcher who completed her PhD alongside a full academic role. The recognition raised her profile, opened doors including an invitation to Cranfield School of Management, and helped her rise to Associate Professor of Responsible Advertising, research on how marketing can be a genuine force for good.

🚀 Story 22 of 50

Unloc believes young people aren't just the leaders of tomorrow, they're the changemakers of today. It helps them build the confidence, skills and leadership to shape their own futures. The Marketors' Trust backed Unloc for five years, reaching more than 10,000 young people a year across 500+ schools. Our funding put iPads into their enterprise workshops and helped extend them into primary schools, so ambition starts even earlier.

🌳 Story 23 of 50

In 2018, Catford was about to lose a much-loved community hub. When the organisation running the Abbotshall Healthy Lifestyle Centre could no longer carry on, local people stepped in, formed a charity and took it on themselves, saving it for the neighbourhood. Today it's a café, community gardens, playing fields, fitness classes and youth football, all kept affordable so everyone can join in. A £2,500 Marketors' Trust grant in 2022 helped it reach more of the people it exists to serve.

🌞 Story 24 of 50

On Pulross Road in Brixton, Papa's Park is open every day of the year: play areas, a floodlit pitch, a community hall, and a café where the food comes "with a Jamaican twist." It was saved from developers back in 1996 by local residents, the Pulross Area Play Association, PAPA, and is still run entirely by volunteers today. A £2,500 Marketors' Trust grant in 2023 helped this much-loved park tell its story and reach more of the community it serves.

🧡 Story 25 of 50

Harry is a downhill mountain biker who's living his best life, and the reason is that his hydrocephalus, a brain condition as common as Down syndrome, was caught early. His mum Caroline founded Harry's HAT to make sure more babies are diagnosed in time. The Marketors' Trust helped rebuild the charity's brand and messaging, and made the case that turned its Get-A-Head early-diagnosis work, now 22,000+ signatures strong, into a core mission.

💛 Story 26 of 50

Most of us mean to give more than we do. The Better Giving Partnership set out to make it easier, with Givto, a service that lets you support a different charity every month through one simple Direct Debit. In 2021 the Marketors' Trust backed its first-ever marketing campaign, helping a small volunteer-run charity reach the givers it was built for.

🏛️ Story 27 of 50

From suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst to the Ford Dagenham strikers, the East End Women's Museum puts east London's women centre stage, and it's the only dedicated women's museum in England. Founded in 2015 and still volunteer-run, it has reached over 20,000 people live and thousands more online. In 2021 the Marketors' Trust helped it make its case to funders, with a grant for two profile-raising events and a printed case for support.

🎬 Story 28 of 50

In 1899, film pioneer Cecil Hepworth built one of Britain's very first film studios in Walton-on-Thames. The building survives today as the Cecil Hepworth Playhouse, and in 2023, when it was threatened with closure, thousands of residents rallied to save it and reopen it as a community charity. The Marketors' Trust helped the new charity build the audiences it needs to keep the lights on.

📚 Story 29 of 50

"What on earth could be more luxurious than a sofa, a book, and a cup of coffee?" asked Anthony Trollope. The Trollope Society's Big Read brings readers from all over the world together on Zoom to enjoy his novels, and in 2023 a Marketors' Trust grant helped its campaign reach 90,000 people, far beyond its 20,000 target, turning readers into supporters.

🎓 Story 30 of 50

The best way to strengthen marketing is to invest in the people who practise it. In 2016 that belief took one of them to Oxford: the Marketors' Trust bursary at Saïd Business School helped Karl Weaver take up a place at one of the world's leading business schools. He has since built a career of more than 25 years in data and strategy, and today co-founds unbAIsed, helping organisations use AI fairly, one sign of how far a single gift can travel.

🎗️ Story 31 of 50

Long Covid is an illness you cannot always see. For International Long Covid Awareness Day, members of Long Covid Support each added a personalised ribbon to a single banner, thousands of stories given physical form, unveiled at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith. A Marketors' Trust grant helped this user-led charity turn its community's voice into a powerful awareness campaign.

🏛️ Story 32 of 50

The Museum of Brands in Notting Hill walks you through 150 years of packaging, adverts and the products of your childhood. It is also where the Marketors' Trust chose to invest in marketers themselves, funding a professional development programme for mid-career marketers with a grant of £15,000 a year, on subjects from neuroscience to a world without brands.

🏆 Story 33 of 50

The best charity marketing often goes unseen, because entering the big industry awards costs money charities would rather spend elsewhere. In 2018 the Marketors' Trust funded free entry to the Marketing Society Excellence Awards for charities and not-for-profits, more than doubling the entries. The winner? Scotland's organ donation campaign, "Everybody can save a life", marketing that genuinely helped save lives.

🎓 Story 34 of 50

In the locked down summer of 2020, Harrison Smith wrote a master's dissertation asking whether creativity still matters in a data driven advertising world. The answer was a resounding yes, and it won him the Trust's University of Westminster award, entered by a tutor who never told him he'd applied. The awards evening turned out to be the night he joined the Marketors too. Today he heads up marketing at Marshall Aerospace, was admitted to the Livery in January, and sits on the Trust Committee choosing the next generation of winners.

🌙 Story 35 of 50

It starts with a simple promise: that no one in the London Borough of Sutton should go to sleep on an empty stomach. From hot drinks and blankets on cold nights, Sutton Night Watch now offers food, showers, clothing, health and benefits support and a place to belong. Its 55 Appeal asks individuals for £5 and businesses for £55, pledged over five years, to fund full-time daytime services, and a £10,000 Marketors' Trust grant in 2022 helped that appeal reach further.

🎓 Story 36 of 50

What makes people trust a brand, and what happens to that trust when AI starts shaping what we see? For £500 a year, the Marketors sponsor Cranfield MSc students to research exactly that, from trust in financial services to how AI-led search and AI-written communications are reshaping brand trust and authenticity. The students present their findings back to the Marketors each autumn.

📱 Story 37 of 50

Watch a small child with a tablet and there is a good chance they are watching another child. Dr Junior Oliveira wanted to understand what young children really take from the child YouTubers they spend hours with, and his research, showing that children are not passive viewers but exercise a "socialisation-driven agency", won the *Worshipful Company of Marketors' 2024 Best Thesis Award* and has since been published in the Journal of Business Research. The Trust's Thesis Prize backs research like his: work that helps parents, teachers and policymakers understand the digital world children are growing up in.

📚 Story 38 of 50

Every survey is a snapshot of its moment, what people bought, believed, feared and hoped for. Gather seventy years of them and you have an accidental history of everyday Britain. That is the Archive of Market and Social Research: a volunteer-run charity that has made it all digital, searchable and free, and which the Marketors' Trust helps keep alive.

🏛️ Story 39 of 50

Long before this campaign, the Marketors were already giving. The Lord Mais, Lord Mayor of London in 1972–73 and Master of the Marketors in 1984, donated the funds for an annual bursary so that a Member could pursue an aspect of marketing close to their heart. A builder of postwar London who understood that the most lasting investments are in people.

🏴‍☠️ Story 40 of 50

The Marketors' Trust doesn't only give to charities, it backs its own members when they take on a challenge, adding £250 to their fundraising. Recently that's meant Liveryman John Newcomb's crew racing a dragon boat dressed as pirates (raising £2,725 for a school in Kenya and the Maddie Rose Trust), and ten Marketors sleeping out in London for the youth homelessness charity Centrepoint.

✨ Story 41 of 50

For most people, turning eighteen is a beginning, not a deadline. But for a young person leaving care, the family safety net, the spare room, the help with a deposit, often simply is not there. The Spark Foundation steps into that gap with small grants that change the shape of a life: the money that makes a course possible, helps someone into a first job, or turns an empty flat into a home. Over the past decade it has helped more than a thousand young care leavers this way. To mark its 21st year in 2024, the Marketors' Trust funded a film to show the world exactly what those grants do, and to help bring in the next round of them.

🪜 Story 42 of 50

Talent is spread evenly, but opportunity is not. Plenty of bright young people would make excellent marketers and never get the chance to find out. The Marketing Academy Foundation exists to change that, increasing social mobility in the industry, and its BeTheOne Bootcamp engaged nearly 180 young people from low-income backgrounds in a single year with partners like Tesco and LEGO. The Marketors' Trust partnered with the Foundation in 2025, and its donation will help place a young candidate in their first real marketing role.

🔦 Story 43 of 50

Somewhere in Surrey tonight, someone is missing, and when a search is on, what matters most is how many people are looking. Surrey Search & Rescue is a team of 80+ trained volunteers, on call around the clock, who help the police find missing and vulnerable people in any terrain and any weather. The Marketors' Trust's £2,500 grant funded a campaign to grow the team's following, because for a search team every new follower is a potential extra set of eyes.

⛪ Story 44 of 50

On Fleet Street, in the old home of London's printing trade, stands St Bride’s, the church whose tiered spire is said to have inspired the wedding cake, and which the world knows as the Journalists' Church. It is the parish church for media, marketing and advertising, and the Marketors' Trust's oldest and longest-standing relationship. The Trust gives an annual donation towards its community work, and through Outreach has brought marketing skill to the church, from branding and web presence to the new history timeline opened this year by Queen Camilla.

💛 Story 45 of 50

When a child is diagnosed with cancer, family life narrows to hospital corridors, and it can be one of the loneliest places a parent, sibling or grandparent will ever stand. The Childhood Cancer Parents Alliance makes sure no family faces it alone, supporting the whole family across the Midlands and, through its outreach service, the wider UK. Even through the pandemic it grew the families it helps by more than 45%. The Marketors' Trust grant funded a social media campaign that turns everyday recycling and clear-outs into income for that support.

🚇 Story 46 of 50

Two hundred years ago, work began on the Thames Tunnel at Rotherhithe, the first tunnel ever dug beneath a river, a feat that nearly killed the young Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Today the volunteer-run Brunel Museum keeps that world-changing story alive, and in 2025 a £5,000 Marketors' Trust grant is helping it grow the membership that secures its future.

🔬 Story 47 of 50

Most science centres are places you have to decide to visit, on a day you have already decided science is for you. Exeter Science Centre, recently renamed The Planetary Lab, wants to reach everyone else, the people told in a hundred small ways that science is "not for people like us", by putting it on the high street. Since 2021 it has engaged more than 17,000 people across the South West, and in 2026 it opens its first permanent home in Barnstaple. The Marketors' Trust's top grant of £10,000 funds its Science on the High Street campaign, the marketing that gets people through the door.

🔬 Story 48 of 50

That open-jar symbol on your make-up, the one that says "12M", is trying to tell you something, but until recently almost no one had studied what shoppers actually make of it. Dr Yujiao (Jade) Wang did, and her thesis on how consumers read cosmetics expiry dates won the 2025 Worshipful Company of Marketors Thesis Prize and was published in the journal Risk Analysis. The Trust's prize backs young researchers whose work reaches beyond the university and into real business practice.

🎓 Story 48 of 50 - bonus story!

In most marketing lectures the case studies are old and the companies are famous. In Claire Culley’s classroom they are neither: her students take on live problems for real small businesses and have to make their ideas work. Her project, The Marketing Lab, won the 2024 *Marketing Teaching Excellence Award*, run by the Academy of Marketing and sponsored by the Marketors, recognition Claire says helped her earn Senior Fellowship and gave her the confidence to push the idea further.

🔑 Story 49 of 50

The day someone leaves prison is meant to be a fresh start, yet half have nowhere settled to live, most are still unemployed six weeks later, and the discharge grant of £82.39 has to last five weeks or more until a first benefit payment arrives. Founded in 1808 and based at the Old Bailey, the Sheriffs' & Recorder's Fund gives modest grants to help prison leavers and their families rebuild: £500 for a window cleaner's equipment, £450 for a fork-lift course. As the charity of a Livery Company, the Marketors' Trust makes an annual donation.

🧭 Story 50 of 50

How do you go missing in a city of nine million people? Often it's the people who don't know they're lost, someone living with dementia, or in a mental health crisis. London Search and Rescue is the country's only urban search team: more than 100 volunteers who turn out at any hour to bring them home. A £10,000 Marketors' Trust grant rebuilt LonSAR's website and branding, so more people find them before they ever need finding.

£50 for 50 ran 1 August to 19 September 2026 · The Marketors' Trust, Registered charity no. 272339