Six and Out: How the Bob Willis Fund raised £2.5 million for prostate cancer research

How the Bob Willis Fund raised £1.5 million on Crowdfunder over 6 years

In the summer of 2021, Edgbaston turned blue for the first time. England played Pakistan in a One Day International, and thousands of fans in the stands wore blue, not for the team, but for Bob. For Bob Willis, the former England captain, the hero of Headingley 1981, the voice of Sky Sports cricket for three decades, who had died of prostate cancer in December 2019 at the age of 70.

While that day raised more than an incredible £300,000, it was also the beginning of something even bigger. The Bob Willis Fund knew it could do something special using the power of cricket. 

The fund and its mission

The Bob Willis Fund was established by his wife Lauren Clark, daughter Katie and his brother David to fund research into prostate cancer and raise awareness of the disease, to achieve a national screening programme 

Prostate cancer is the number one diagnosed male cancer in the UK, killing 12,000 men a year. Yet, there is still no national screening programme and the current test (the PSA test) is unreliable. 

It didn’t work for Bob. Bob had been a healthy 66-year-old when he was diagnosed in April 2016. His PSA was only very slightly raised. A urologist told him there was nothing to worry about. Six weeks later, a biopsy told a different story: advanced prostate cancer that had spread into his bones. He died three years and eight months after his diagnosis. Bob’s story proves there is still so much research needed. That conviction became the fund’s driving force.

#BlueForBob: building a campaign from grief and cricket

The genius of #BlueForBob is that it uses cricket, a sport Bob loved and defined, as both the occasion and the audience; made possible by partners Sky, the ECB and Edgbaston.

The Fund has now raised over £2.5m since it began, raising £1.5m of that on Crowdfunder through campaigns and prize draws, funding groundbreaking research at the Institute of Cancer Research, Imperial College, the University of East Anglia, Prostate Cancer Research and Prostate Cancer UK, developing blood and urine tests and genetic mapping to enhance early detection methods.

Every campaign lived on Crowdfunder.

How they built the campaign

A hashtag with meaning

#BlueForBob is more than a fundraising slogan. It gave the campaign a visual identity, the colour blue, Bob’s colour, that could travel across social media, through TV coverage, and around a cricket ground. When Sky Sports broadcasters wore blue on air, when Ben Stokes pulled on a blue cap, when the Edgbaston crowd lit up in blue, the hashtag connected all of it back to a donation page.

The fund used prize draws on Crowdfunder to deepen that connection. Supporters could win a signed England ODI shirt from the Pakistan match, Ben Stokes’ signed cap from BlueForBob Day, and two tickets to an intimate evening with Bob Willis and Jimmy Anderson. These weren’t generic prizes; they were artefacts from the days that mattered, tied directly to the cause.

Crowdfunder as the consistent platform

Every campaign, from the flagship annual BlueForBob Day to smaller prize draws and personal fundraisers like Ron’s March for Prostate Cancer, ran through Crowdfunder. That consistency mattered. Supporters who donated in 2021 could find the 2025 page immediately. The platform became the home of the fund’s public fundraising, not just a tool for one campaign.

Adam Askew, a co-founder of the charity, has been explicit about why every campaign has stayed on Crowdfunder: it’s a platform they trust, and trust matters when you’re driving thousands of supporters to a single page on a single day. On BlueForBob Day, the fund doesn’t just need a donation page it needs infrastructure that can handle a spike of national scale without dropping. That confidence in the platform is part of why they’ve never looked elsewhere.

Ron’s March is a particular example worth noting: a personal challenge by a supporter who walked 29 routes across two years in honour of the fund, raising 1,875% of his original target. User-generated campaigns like this, built by supporters, not the fund itself, are one of the most powerful signals of a fundraising movement that has genuinely taken root.

Six and Out

The 2026 campaign, titled Six and Out, marked the last ever #BlueForBob Day at Edgbaston, as England faced India in a One-Day International. 

The fund isn’t stopping. What it leaves behind is £2.5 million of research funding, a community of thousands of supporters, and proof that a cause rooted in love and loss can move a sport, shift a conversation, and save lives.

What other fundraisers can learn from #BlueForBob

Give it a visual identity. Blue. One colour. Instantly recognisable, completely ownable, endlessly shareable.

Anchor it to an event. A match, a day, a moment, something with a date in the diary that creates urgency and a shared experience for thousands of people at once.

Mix your products. Donation campaigns, prize draws, personal fundraisers, always-on giving pages, each one does a different job. Together they build a fundraising ecosystem rather than a single annual ask.

Use what only you have. The cricket community, the Sky Sports family, the England dressing room, the fund’s network was specific to Bob and irreplaceable. Every fundraiser has their equivalent. The question is how to activate it.

Let others make it theirs. When Ron started marching, when fans set up their own donation pages, the campaign stopped being something the fund did and became something the community owned. That’s when a campaign becomes a movement.