Help Abused Young Women get Justice in Leeds

Before working with GlobalGiving we had very limited experience of on-line fundraising and no experience of crowdfunding. So, full of excitement and trepidation we got lots of support and advice from them and put together our donations page, trying to explain what we do and why. We tried to get across to potential new donors (you!) how much we would appreciate any donation and how special we would feel no matter how much people could afford to give us.

Nik says: “Our whole organisation – both paid staff and Trustees – got on board very early on; we publicised our Page electronically, did off-line events and annoyed everyone we knew, asking them to donate – the momentum was spectacular!”

We set a full project target of £5,336, but the target of the Challenge was that we hoped to be able to reach £2,500 with 50 donors. If we did this, we would become a ‘partner’ of GlobalGiving, and then we would be able to use their site, and their expertise, to continue to raise money towards the full target over time.

Nik continues: “We knew that we were unlikely to win the challenge as we are a small to medium local charity and were up against national and international charities, but the camaraderie was excellent within the challenge and the spirit of ‘joining in’ really rubbed off. Our team were amazing, we had buckets, cupcakes, on-line donations, biscuit baking (see the theme!!) and it all started an incredible momentum that didn’t seem to stop”.

We faced setbacks but also came up with innovative ideas – because it was Christmas time they did a social media campaign to ask people to donate to their charity instead of buying Christmas cards. Also a member of staff wrote a really engaging poem.

Dawn (author of the poem) says: “I love poems and find it is a way of getting a lot of information to people in a short and fun way. I find it easy to write things in an engaging way in a poem and it’s great to see people’s reactions to it”.

Although our team knew that we have a lifesaving project, it was quite difficult to promote as we can’t use photographs of real clients due to their age and the sensitivity and risk attached to our work, we were successful at generating more and more interest.

We managed to beat the GG target of £2,500 and our total stands at £2,803 and we have had 68 individual donations.

Nik ends by saying: “Because of the amazing training and resources offered to us by the brilliant GlobalGiving team, the dedication of the whole of our organisation in learning and translating that learning into action, and the amazing support and generosity of you, our donors, we are now a “Super Star” partner of GlobalGiving and are already a Top-Ranked Organisation (we have a ‘badge’ to prove it!) We have thoroughly enjoyed the Crowdfunding Challenge, it has been so rewarding, both financially (donations are still coming in!) and knowledge wise for the organisation.”