Best Local/Regional Campaign

Howard Lake | 1 May 2007 | Blogs

For the best campaign conducted by any regional charity, or a branch of a national charity or charities with fundraised income of less than £2m a year excluding legacies. The successful campaign may have used one single fundraising method, or a variety of methods.
The shortlisted nominations are (in alphabetical order):
The Big C Cancer Information & Support Centre

In January 2004 Big C launched an appeal to raise £1m for a Family Cancer Information and Support Centre at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital. The campaign immediately gained the support of the Norwich Evening News which started its own ‘Opening the Door’ campaign and pledged to raise £250,000 from its readers. It gave publicity to any reader who held a fundraising event for the Centre or made a donation and also held a Charity Ball.
Trusts were approached, a ‘Buy a Brick’ scheme launched and Rotary Clubs in Norwich pledged to raise £20,000. Corporates in the area adopted Big C as their charity of the year.
The Centre opened its doors in May 2006 after raising enough to build, fit, furnish and cover the running costs for the first year. Income rose dramatically from £445,563 in 2004 to £1,164,039 in 2005 and more than £1.6m in 2006.
The campaign has had a huge impact on the charity and exposure has been so great that many local people are surprised that it is a local, independent cancer charity, and not affiliated to a national charity.
Grove House Campaign: The Herts 10k Challenge
Grove House is a hospice in St Albans, Hertfordshire. Its funding from the local primary care trust was cut by £50,000 and the Herts 10K challenge was created to replace this shortfall.
It intended to replace the £25,000 shortfall for 2006, increase awareness of the charity within the local community, use a donation of £10,000 from event sponsor Levy Associates to create a long-term income stream, develop a long-term business/charity relationship and create an annual event to serve as a yearly reminder of the charity and its work.
The 1,048 runners paid £12 to register and received a branded t-shirt and a race information pack. The target audience was reached through posters in over 100 local shops, dozens of banners, local press, radio and website. Grove House had media support from local newspapers, magazines and radio.
The total raised was £62,174, including a donation from the BBC of £10,000. The goal of adding 500 new local contacts to the database was doubled and an additional £11,649 was raised through Gift Aid. Three of the hospice’s trustees volunteered at the Run, including the chair, and the chief executive ran the race along with nine staff from the spnosoring company and Grove House.
Grove House has only been fundraising independently for four years and had never organised an event of this scale. It took a risk in organising the event which has paid off handsomely. The event has added valuable skills and confidence to a fairly new fundraising team.
Sense Scotland ‘Making it Happen’ campaign

This campaign arose from an organisation strategic decision to build a new resource centre for service users and combined head office. It needed to raise £500,000 to build the centre and achieve this within existing staffing resources. Sense Scotland decided to skill-up existing staff members and ‘get our sleeves rolled up’ and do the fundraising internally, rather than hire in help or wait to set up an appeal committee. Initial target audiences were trusts, grantmakers and statutory sources, following by an approach to corporate and individual donors.
Actual results exceeded all objectives. Total income was £1,829,328 – over three and a half times the original target (the normal fundraising of the organisation would generate in the region of £1m a year). This was achieved within existing staffing resources and the activity impacted positively on other fundraising activity so that fundraising incomes during and after the campaign has continued to rise.
Awareness of the facilities has been raised among the people the charity works with, among local community groups, social work, social care and arts organisations. Unsolicited funds have increased since the appeal and a funder of the appeal has gone on to give increased funding for new work within the centre.

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.