Chapter 1 Sections

1.2 Fundraising

Prior to the launch of Grown in Totnes Holly, partly as an employee of TTT and partly as a volunteer, had secured the following monies:

• Esmee Fairbairn - £117,000 for the first 3 years

• A Team Challenge - £6,000 on the condition that this was matched by a further £6,000 raised through crowdfunding

• Crowdfunding campaign - £20,000

• UnLtd - £5,000

Over the course of the project we secured the following further funding

• Invest in Devon Fund - £9,125

• Private donor - £1,700

• Esmee Fairbairn -  £38,230 for a further year

We applied to a number of other charitable trusts and private individuals unsuccessfully, including Awards for All and The Prince’s Trust.

1.2.1 Not Included in this case Study, see Checklist 1.2

1.2.2 Crowdfunding

One of the most intense periods of the project was pulling together and orchestrating our crowdfunder, throughout which, we had up to 14 volunteers meeting on a weekly basis, to plan and implement the campaign. We had already secured £6,000 from the A Team Challenge - a collaboration between The A Team Foundation, the crowdfunding platform Buzzbnk and Funding Enlightened Agriculture (FEA) - which required that we crowdfund a matching sum using the Buzzbnk platform. Buzzbnk offered us training and guidance in how to run our campaign and, although they are no longer in operation, their advice would stand for other crowdfunding platforms. Their support pack can be found here and will give you the tools to plan your campaign; here is a sample action plan.  

Because we realised that the majority of our target audience would be local, we designed our campaign to interact with the local community as much as possible, and to fulfill the dual purposes of raising funds and pre-marketing our products to our future customers. To this end we put together a wide-ranging programme of events.

In that first year we were ‘The Oat Project’ and our focus was growing oats. All of our events were around the theme of oats and were designed to be fun and engaging. We piggy-backed on the Dartington Food Festival and hosted a Magic Porridge Pot competition, with Goldilocks and 3 Scottish judges!  We hosted a 4-course “Oat Cuisine” dinner, with oats featuring in every course, served with oat stout from the New Lion Brewery. We gave out free samples of porridge to early morning commuters at the train station and we ran a hilarious Porridge Jousting event at the Dartington Community Day.

Our campaign materials included our Crowdfunding promotional video which appeared on both the Buzzbnk and the Transition Town Totnes websites

our campaign leaflet

and a totaliser designed to depict what we wanted to use the money for.

We were asking for £25,000 specifically for the processing equipment, as this felt more appealing than our other costs, such as staff wages, and it strengthened the message that GinT was a community owned project. 24 events ran over the course of May 2014, our hard work paid off, and the addition of a £10,000 anonymous pledge in the final hour ensured that we raised just over £26,000. During the course of the campaign we were told by Buzzbnk that, for that amount of money, we should have run the campaign for 2 months. Our decision to run it for only a month was based on how long we could sustain our energy, weighed against how many people we thought we could reach, plus an amount of naivety!

We offered rewards to donors to the campaign, these all had an oat theme (and name!):