Anj’s journey with Made With Hope
Our International Project Assistant Anj smashed her fundraising target and has raised over £2,500 so far. But how did she do it? We asked her to blog about her fundraising experience and share the secrets of her success. Anj’s fundraiser is still open, and you can donate here.
In 2019, I decided that I was finally going to pluck up the courage and take some time off work to volunteer in a developing country. I have been researching charities and organisations to volunteer with for many years, but I hadn’t felt like I had found the right one for me to support. In the summer of 2019, whilst speaking with a friend who was fundraising for Made With Hope (MWH), I decided to research more about MWH’s mission and projects. I was impressed at what MWH had achieved and the projects the charity was focusing on. For me, it was important that if I was going to volunteer abroad, I would be able to make tangible changes that the communities would benefit from long term. I felt that I would be able to achieve this with MWH.
Anj and Hussein outside the CHETI office.
Fundraising
After a few meetings with Alex (Chair of MWH) & Eleanor (Founder of MWH) to understand more about MWH and the ongoing projects, I decided that this was a charity that I wanted to support. After agreeing on an international volunteer placement with Eleanor, the next step for me was to raise funds for MWH.
When I set up my online fundraising page, I made sure that the description of my fundraising initiative was personal, as in the past I have found that friends & family can connect more with the cause if they know why donating towards that particular cause is important to me. Once complete, I shared my fundraising page on social media (Instagram- I added a link to my fundraising page in my bio & added a story to let people know how to donate & I also shared a post on Facebook) and sent an email to my colleagues at work. When doing this, I made sure that I was clear on the charity’s mission, why what MWH is doing is so important and the impact that any donations would have on Tanzanian children. Friends and family in my network were interested to learn more about MWH’s work and I made sure that I was clear on what I would be working on when I travelled to Tanzania. The last point was particularly important, because I found that my friends & family wanted to know exactly what I would be contributing towards in Tanzania.
For the first month or so after setting up my fundraising page, I made sure to post bi-weekly updates on my instagram story on what projects MWH was working on and how donations would help communities in Tanzania, as a prompt because sometimes people have good intentions to donate but forget to until prompted to do so. I found that making my updates short and factual (I often used statistics and photos so people could see and understand the current situation easily) was useful and got people talking. I tried not to bombard my friends and followers with posts every week but found a good balance in which to share MWH stories and updates on how far I had gotten with my fundraising target.
I also wanted to organise a fundraising event to raise money, but I wanted to do something different from anything I had done before. After some brainstorming, I decided to email the manager of one of the studios at my gym (1Rebel) in London, to ask if I could hire out the spin studio for a charity spin class. When emailing her, I made sure that I was very descriptive in what I was requesting, but more importantly why, to ensure that she gave me the best price which would allow me to raise as much for MWH as possible. She was really supportive and gave me a hugely discounted price to hire the room, although I know that there are some gyms that may hire out studios for charity fundraising for free (so worth looking and emailing around, if you do not have a specific gym in mind). For me, choosing this particular gym was important because my friends & family know how much I love going to my gym, so combining this particular spin class with a charity event was key in ensuring that as many people signed up as possible. I have often found that fundraising events that are personal to you, or combine a passion of yours with a fundraising activity will interest more people around you to engage and donate. I also made sure to tell my friends and family to invite people from their network.
Three things to consider when fundraising:
When sharing your fundraiser event/fundraising link, make sure that your story is personal to you
Post regular (but not too many!) updates on social media, informing your friends & family of project updates or updating them on how far you have come with your fundraising- encourage them to donate
Keep your fundraising updates short and factual (e.g. if you are fundraising to build a classroom, share pictures of the state of the classroom currently and explain what donations will go towards/how they will impact the end user, use statistics to show how many people the money you are fundraising for will benefit)
