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!
Fundraiser for 2023
Keep the Batumi Raptor Count flying high with your support
For thirteen years the BRC has conducted high quality raptor migration counts. This long-term monitoring is critical to understand how bird populations are doing in our rapidly changing world. However, structural funding for monitoring schemes such as ours is very hard, if not impossible, to find. Over the years we’ve been able to run our counts thanks to the support from loyal sponsors like OSME and Swarovski Optik, T-shirt sales, donations from ecotourism operators and members of the public, and last but not least: thousands of hours of unpaid work by over 400 volunteers from dozens of countries. This has enabled us to do monitoring work of extraordinary quality, delivering unique data to detect trends in the abundance, demography and migration timing of otherwise poorly known raptor populations. Furthermore, we’ve always tried to be as open and transparent as possible by having open data sharing procedures. This sets us apart from many bird observatories worldwide.
Last year, for the first time in BRC history, we started a big crowdfunding campaign to raise the budget needed to run this year’s count. The response from the birdwatching community to our campaign was immense and its success exceeded all of our expectations! We are very grateful to all of you who decided to support us. Thanks to your generosity, we already have a decent budget of at least 6000 EUR in our wallet for the autumn count of 2023. Nonetheless, this is not enough to run another full season count. For this reason we are picking up crowdfunding again.
Help us raise funds for the 2023 count
Securing the count comes with the same deal as before: we need 20.000 EUR to run our 2023 autumn count. Our aim is to raise this amount before the end of October when the current autumn count finishes. Given our large international base of supporters and followers, the many visitors we hope to see in Batumi this autumn, and the generosity of the birdwatching and nature conservation community, we believe it should be possible!
On the crowdfunding page you can find more details on how your money will be put to use. To already give some examples: on average, 200 EUR funds one day of counting. With 130 EUR you fund a one-week participation of a young Georgian conservationist. So what are you waiting for? Please, help us circulate this message widely by sharing this message with all your friends and family! The sooner we get our budgets together, the better our team can focus on organising next year’s count. Instead of spending days behind our computer wasting time competing with other conservation groups for small grants, we can put all our efforts in producing important research and organising valuable education and conservation work in parallel to the counts. Your donation makes a massive difference to us, and you know we’ll use it wisely!
Successful completion of 2022 Crowdfunding!
When we launched our crowdfunding campaign on Christmas Eve 2021 we were not entirely sure what to expect. Over the years we have received endless words of encouragement and appreciation. However, asking people to match that appreciation with financial contributions is something else, and past attempts to raise donations have not been as successful as we hoped. Nevertheless, believing in the value of our work, realising that we had little other funding options left, and counting on the generosity of the birdwatching community, we decided to set an ambitious goal: to raise 20.000EUR before the call for volunteers would be published. Now, we are very happy and proud to say that we did even better! We raised over 23.000EUR in a little over 3 months. Added to our reserves from 2021 means we currently have 28.840EUR to invest in raptor monitoring in Batumi. What a delight!
The whole crowdfunding endeavour has been hugely exciting to the BRC team. As soon as we published the crowdfunding campaign donations started streaming in, and by 29 Dec we had crossed the mark of 10.000EUR. This was probably the moment when many team members started to believe we could really reach our ambitious 20K target. By mid-February the counter stood at 16K. At that point the rate at which donations were coming did slow down a lot. Fortunately, however, we still had an ace up our sleeves...
Behind the scenes OSME had taken notice of our efforts, and kindly offered to match up to 2K in donations to help boost the crowdfunding. We cooked up a plan to launch a joint campaign on March 1st, the day that our 3rd and final spring count started (also funded by OSME btw!). A few days before that the war in Ukraine started. Nevertheless, we decided to stick to our plan. After all, and as we wrote before, projects like the BRC, where people from all creeds come together to work towards a common goal, and form friendships across cultural and national borders, are precisely what’s needed to help build a peaceful future in this crazy world.
The response to our joint campaign with OSME was amazing. By March 8th we hit the 20K target, and donations kept coming in even after that! Swarovski Optik pitched in with a donation of 1000EUR, and we were informed that around 2000EUR of donations had arrived to our project account at Natuurpunt, which facilitates tax-deductible donations for our Belgian supporters.
All together we now have 28.000EUR in reserves, plenty to fund the 2022 autumn count, and nearly half of the budget we’ll need for 2023. 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 counters and new volunteers next autumn. Didi madloba!