Fund-raising Retrospective

Yet more exciting news came through the post this week: my placement in Guyana has been confirmed! I now have lots more information about it, which will come up on this website shortly. However, before I start looking ahead to departure, and posting information about the project and Guyana, I thought it might be a good moment to cast a quick glance back over how the fund-raising’s gone.

I looked back through all the posts on this website recently, and it’s quite encouraging how many of the fund-raising ideas I’ve actually pulled off, along with a great deal of help from many people. A few of the highlights were:

• The night-before Valentine’s Day Ball, which I organised with Ross (who’s going to Chile with Project Trust); ironically, this didn’t successfully raise any money, barely covering the costs, but it was still a great night.


• Leicester Dress-in-Purple Day: a day held at my school where all 92 boys in my House (Leicester) at school were invited to dress in purple, and get their friends and families to sponsor them; this was the most successful single venture for my fund-raising, raising £718.65.


• The now-famous weekly muffin sales, which earned me the title of ‘The Muffin Man’ among most of the lower years at my school.

So, of all the plans that I mentioned on the website, here are those that I pulled off:

• Produce an information leaflet to give to all potential donors;


• Sell home-made muffins at school with Ross;


• Run a raffle at the school Christmas fair (although admittedly this was only for one Magnum of Champagne, and I split the proceeds with Ross);


• Lay on a black-tie ball (albeit without the expected financial success);


• Hold a sponsored Dress-in-Purple Day at school;


• Get half the school Christmas Carol Service collection to be donated to Project Trust (on my behalf);


• Hand out Smarties tubes to all my colleagues at work, and ask for them to be returned in a couple of months filled with 20p coins;


• Send out Christmas cards to all my family, including the leaflet with them.

And these are the ones I failed to get around to:

• Send out letters & leaflets to over 100 charities/companies.

Given a natural tendency to apathy – especially when the deadline seemed so far away – I don’t think that’s bad going, and it certainly was enough: I’ve now gone beyond my target of £3,950. Hopefully any future Project Trust volunteers looking for some fund-raising ideas will find something useful here.

As far as writing to charities is concerned, I think I found a happy medium. Project Trust suggested the most successful way to raise money in this fashion would be to write to at least 100, ‘blindly’: that is, look up at least 100 charities in The Directory of Grant-Making Trusts that your project might seem more-or-less relevant to, and send off a letter and your leaflet to them. Project Trust suggested over 100, because the success rate is not very high, and even lower writing to companies. I wrote off to around 30 companies ‘blindly’, and received one donation, so this was presumably about the average return rate (3.33% to 3s.f.).

Instead, however, I did write to two ‘targeted’ charities: that is, charities which are very closely linked either to me or what I intend to do in Guyana, and therefore from which I would have a much higher chance of receiving some donation. Both of these were successful: the St Michael’s at the Northgate Church’s Education Trust is based at my local church which my family have been regular members at (and where I sang in the choir until I was 13), and have promised a donation of £250 (still pending), and the Bulkeley-Evans Scholarship Fund provides scholarships to pupils from HMC schools (which my school happens to be) going to Commonwealth countries in their gap years, and has supported Project Trust volunteers frequently in the past, and donated a very generous £500.

Not only did writing to these two charities prove very beneficial, it was also far more effective than writing to anything less than 100 charities blindly, and so is definitely an avenue I would recommend to future fund-raisers (of course, finding such charities may be impossible or require far more research than just sitting in the library with the Directory for two days, so it depends; I was lucky).

And, of course, a large part of these funds came from the vast well of generosity that is my family (the sprawling Warner tribe), and I owe a great deal of thanks to all of them, as well as my House-tutor Mrs Lydford, who suggested most of the ideas for fund-raising at school.

So, at last: the end of the fund-raising posts. No doubt I gained some valuable experience in the process of raising £3,950, but I’m not sad to have completed it, and if even I can manage to do it two months before the deadline, I hope anyone reading this who might consider a gap year – and is put off by the cost – might stop to reconsider.