My sister-in-law Claire Goult had been awarded a place to run the London Marathon for The Autism Society. During one of our running training sessions, she told me of her goal of raising money for the charity.

Having ran both London and New York marathons for charity, I understood just how difficult it can be to raise money.

After discussing it with Claire and my wife Fiona, we decided to organise a charity night with the profits being shared between the The Autism Society and Macmillan Cancer Support (a charity close to the sisters’ hearts as their mother had previously had cancer and recovered a few years ago).

We wanted to make it a family charity night. We timed it between Christmas and the New Year. The timing was good because it was a good opportunity to meet up at Christmas and for a good cause too. For many parents a night out together is once in a blue moon and this event was set up so they could bring the kids and come as a family.

The venue was the Standard Triumph Club in Coventry. They are customers of Hire Jukebox. They very kindly let us have use of one of their function rooms for free as it was for a good cause. Within the room we set up stalls (with the children helping) that included face painting, tombola and nail painting.

We also had a quiz that the whole family could get involved in and prize donations were given by some local businesses and friends who couldn’t make it. Hire Jukebox supplied the entertainment for the evening. To replace the DJ we provided a VenueHub digital jukebox.

The VenueHub jukebox allows you to set the background music to suit your venue. For this occasion we decided to use the “Playlist” option. “Playlist” allows you to select your favourite music from thousands of music tracks stored within the hard drive of the jukebox.

You can select from either category such as Dance, Rock, Pop etc. or by entering the name of the artist or title of the song. We compiled a list of popular songs/guaranteed foor-fillers from artists such as Black Eyed Peas, Calvin Harris, Tinie Tempah, Rihanna and Michael Jackson.

The music selected was all high BPM and the “cross fade” option allows the songs to be faded in and out of each other seamlessly (like a DJ mixing one song into another).

The great thing is that if someone wants to select a song the background song fades out and their songs kicks in.

The children were the first to go up and start searching and playing their favourite music on the jukebox. It wasn’t long before we realised we had a lot of Little Mix, One Direction and Jessie J fans!

Shortly after this, the adults got involved. Once one got up, many followed and at one stage there was a queue of people waiting for a go on the jukebox!

I notice that many of them loved browsing through the music category sections such as 80’s and 90’s etc. They were also impressed by the date search feature – which allows you to enter any date since 1960 and the jukebox gives you the Top 40 charts from that week.

Some of the grandparents from Irish descent were playing popular Irish music such as Paddy Reilly – The Fields of Athenry. It was great to see first hand how a jukebox can really create an atmosphere and bring people together.

We also asked people to email us some of their favourite family photos. We uploaded these onto the jukebox and they were then displayed on the 32″ touch screen display.

The night was huge success and after outgoings, we helped to raise over £500.

It was such a success we have decided that this is to be an annual event and we have many people already offering to help out next year.

The feedback about the jukebox has been amazing. Claire posted on her Facebook page – “The jukebox was amazing…. the best I had ever experienced for sound, quality and choice”.