Successful completion of 2023 Crowdfunding!
Less than three months ago, on Christmas Eve 2022, we re-launched our crowdfunding campaign to fund the upcoming autumn count of 2023. While we already started raising awareness during the past 2022 autumn count, we had raised just about 5000EUR of our 20.000EUR target. Since we had little other funding options left, we knew we had to continue with the crowdfunding to raise the amount needed to continue our monitoring work in the Batumi bottleneck. Now, we are very happy and proud to say that we raised over 20.000EUR in the past months!
While we already successfully ran our crowdfunding campaign last year, the BRC team was nonetheless hugely excited, and perhaps slightly nervous to relive the rollercoaster of going through another crowdfunding campaigning this year again. After the 2022 autumn count, we were a mere few thousand euro away from the 10.000EUR mark. And right after re-launching our campaign during Christmas, the donations started coming in and soon after we hit the 10K mark! While trying to keep the attention through social media and our newsletter, the rate of donations slowed down quite a bit. It wasn’t until the first of March when our counter hit the 14K bar. This was the moment to reveal our cards…
Similarly to last year, our long-time friends at OSME kindly offered to help us reach our target by matching up to 3K in donations! We planned the donation matching campaign to start on the 1st of March and finish on the 14th. And with the 14K on the counter, we knew that in theory we’d only needed 3K more in donations to, in combination with the matching campaign, reach our goal! But little did we know that the matching campaign sparked a huge boost under our supporters and the birdwatching community. In less than two weeks we received over 6000EUR in donations! And on top of this we would receive the 3K in donation matching by OSME!
Of these donations, we received over 1000EU of donations that had arrived to our project account at Natuurpunt, which facilitates tax-deductible donations for our Belgian supporters. Additionally, our friends at NatureWalks organised a raptor identification course and they donated no less than 620EUR to our project!
Combined, we raised 28.471 EUR during the past few months! This means, once again, we overshot our crowdfunding target, leaving plenty to fund the 2023 autumn count, and nearly half of the budget we’ll need for the autumn count of 2024! The enthusiastic response to our crowdfunding campaign has made us feel hugely supported by the international birdwatching community, and we hope we will be able to rely on that support in years to come. After all, and despite ongoing efforts to secure more structural funding, our monitoring work will continue to depend on your generous support for the foreseeable future.
That said, thanks to your support the immediate future looks bright, and we are excited we’ll be able to organise another outstanding count with many old-time friends and new volunteers next autumn. Didi madloba!
P.S. Our call for count coordinators for Autumn 2023 is opened, and the call for counters will open on April 15th!