The bear necessities
Howard Lake | 14 November 1998 | News
Waverley Bear is a 10cm plush teddy bear who introduces Waverley Care’s online fundraising appeal. The Web site is a testament to what smaller charities can achieve. Apart from volunteer time spent learning HTML, it took the charity less than one month to complete and cost them $120 – and that was spent registering the domain name.
Read UK Fundraising’s report below.
Howard Lake Reports:
Waverley Bear is a 10cm plush teddy bear who introduces Waverley Care’s fundraising appeal on its Web site. Waverley encourages visitors to wear a red and green tartan ribbon to show that they care for people in Scotland living with HIV and AIDS and their families.
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The site is a testament to what lesser known charities can achieve with an Internet presence. Fundraising clearly informs the whole site. As well as being able to read about the different projects supported, visitors can buy from a small range of merchandise, find out how to volunteer, learn about upcoming fundraising events, and see which companies are supporting the charity. One of them happens to be UUNET Pipex who are donating the hosting of the Web site.
There’s an interesting incentive on offer, and note that the charity is addressing not only UK citizens but also people overseas. You can receive a free tartan ribbon, but you do have to complete a form giving your details, helping the charity generate a list of interested visitors.
Waverley Care are offering their volunteer opportunities leaflet and annual report on the Net. Sensibly they haven’t converted them to HTML but are offering them in Adobe Acrobat formats.
“We have produced this site in less than a month, from a standing start,” said Gordon Hudson, Fundraising Manager. He designed the site himself together with one other staff member “but neither of us knew anything about web page design.”
They used a book called “HTML for the World Wide Web” by Elizabeth Castro which suited them well as it was based on using Adobe Photoshop for image work, and they already used the package for their publications. “Most of the text was typed up using the free Microsoft Front Page Express with the page layouts refined in HTML.”
“This web site has cost us nothing apart from the 120 USD for the domain name,” said Hudson. “If we can do it then I am sure any charity can!”
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.