If you an avid reader of The Sun newspaper (or an occasional/secret reader!) you may have perhaps seen its Auction for Heroes charity event this month (April 2009).

Auction for Heroes aims to raise £20m for the Help the Heroes organisation – a national charity set up to raise money for injured soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The tabloid’s fundraiser sold unwanted items from its readers on an eBay site dedicated to the cause and it also used an 03 phone number as its main donation line: 0300 200 1066.

At last count the auction had nearly smashed its target – raising a fantastic £19m.

Here are 6 ways an 03 phone number helped to achieve this:

1. 03 phone numbers (http://www.windsor-telecom.co.uk/03-numbers.php) cost the same to call as standard 01/02 phone numbers even from a mobile phone (40% of all calls are now made from mobiles).

2. The public trust 03 numbers because of their transparent call costs. This makes 03 numbers caller friendly and therefore not subject to negative publicity.

3. There’s a range of 03 numbers that are exclusively for public bodies and charities: 0300 numbers.

4. Like all non-geographic numbers, 03 numbers gave the auction a national presence – meaning The Sun was able to publish one single memorable number throughout the UK – which is not location specific.

5. An 03 number donation line can have intelligent call systems added to it easily. For example, welcome messages and caller options. E.g. “Welcome to the Auction for Heroes donation line, press 1 to donate, press to for more information about where your donation goes etc.)

6. 03 phone numbers (http://www.windsor-telecom.co.uk/03-numbers.php) can often be inexpensive to run if you seek out the provider with the most competitive offering in the market.

It’s also for these reasons that calls to the British Heart Foundation’s 03 Heart Helpline have increased by 500% following a recent advertising campaign.

Additionally, Comic Relief beat its fundraising record by 40% with its new 03 number appeal line.

So, it’s clear that the uptake of 03 phone numbers (http://www.windsor-telecom.co.uk/03-numbers.php) continues to rocket and it’s not just charities and public bodies that are using them. UK businesses of all shapes and sizes are now choosing 03 numbers, including Pioneer, Nikon and Absolute Radio (formerly Virgin Radio). It will be interesting to see who’s next in line…

A reverse phone search is the a search performed in reverse, i.e., you know the number, and you use it to find the name of the person to which it belongs. These days, most lookup services are web based. They allow you to sign up for a particular membership plan to their database, and you can then search for the owners of one or more phone numbers. A reverse lookup is a lot cheaper and faster than doing a full background check on someone. Most reverse call memberships offer a yearly membership so you can use the service for an entire year.

You should think of it as a specialized service that is usually offered for a small fee (in return for a membership, if you want to do multiple searches). The reason why this kind of a service is not free to use is because of the huge effort that goes into building a massive database containing millions of detailed records, regarding virtually every phone number in the entire country. A reverse phone search is necessary for a variety of reasons. One example may be because you are receiving a number of irritating calls from pranksters. After you perform the reverse lookup, you should get the name and address of the person calling.

Cell phone records have frequently been in demand lately, for a number of reasons. Most commonly, others want to investigate (usually through the use of a reverse lookup) an unfamiliar number to find out more about the caller. Cell phone numbers are generally more private than regular landlines, since you’re charged for every call you receive, including telemarketers that you don’t want to talk to (although it’s illegal for them to call your cell phone without permission). The reverse cell phone lookup performs its responsibilities by searching through billions of numbers in white pages, directories, and databases and giving you the information you’re searching for.

Cell phone numbers are a bit more difficult to search for than land based phone numbers because accessibility to the information on cell phones was not readily available until recently. Cell phone numbers are not available through normal reverse phone look up services such as whitepages.com. In fact, until recently, a reverse phone look up for cell phones was not even possible. Free reverse phone number directories are collections of phone numbers in the public domain. These numbers consist only of land line numbers which include the owner’s name and address.

“Reverse Phone Search” – A term you may be hearing a lot about lately, this is because privacy has changed and what most people think is unavailable to others is actually right at their fingertips! Say you own a cell phone or you have your home phone number blocked from the public directory so nobody can look you up.. Well if you payed to have it blocked then you’ve sort of been jipped!

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Anyone can simply go online and do a reverse phone search at a number of different places, all they need is a phone number whether it be unlisted or a cell phone, and find out the owners full name and address as well as much more information for most numbers…

This is a good and bad thing, if you want your privacy then you have just found out you no longer have it, but if you would like your phone number to be unlisted for real this time, then you can once again pay to have it removed from the database, its cheap and only takes a couple minutes.

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Now, if you are like most people and get extremely frustrated with prank callers, then this is a new way to search that unlisted phone number and find out who is behind the pranks… Curious of who your spouse is speaking to, then all you need to do is look at their called history or a cell phone bill and do a reverse phone search on that number, instantly you will be glorified with quality results. This data base is not free anywhere due to the nature of the work and money involved in creating such a system, but it is very inexpensive for a one year membership or single searches… much cheaper than hiring a “Private Investigator”…

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