CEO Pauline Bowie started the charity LIFT (Low Income Families Together) in Edinburgh six years ago. After funding finished on a project to help people into employment, she was struggling in finding a way to signpost the families she worked with onto more support.
So, she decided to use some of her redundancy money and do it herself!
Pauline secured some space at the Millennium Centre in Edinburgh, but unfortunately strict criteria stopped her from accessing suitable support funding for the families. But she decided to continue with her mission until she had support in place for the people she was helping. She thought it would only take a few months to do this…but six years later, she is still there, helping so many families in an area of severe deprivation and poverty.
Pauline now has 11 staff and her referrals for family support increase every year. However, whilst Pauline had some funding available to her to provide support, it was very restricted in the way it could be used. She needed more money to be able to keep the centre open and help all the families with her much-needed service.
So, Pauline decided to launch a crowdfunding campaign and ask the local community to help her. LIFT quickly raised £5,000 through crowdfunding, which helped leverage additional donations from several organisations, and ended up securing a huge £40,000 in three months – enough to cover the entire running costs of the centre for one year.
Key to her success was a very emotional and engaging campaign where local people in the community played a central role. Parents spoke in front of the full City of Edinburgh Council, delivering a very heart felt deputation, and one young lady read out her own poem about the massively positive impact LIFT had on her life.
Knowing that it was a very hard time for everyone financially, Pauline really didn’t expect to raise £5,000 from the community, but the team worked hard to engage and communicate with everyone. They had a huge graph on the wall in the centre in full view of anyone coming in. Every time a donation was made it was filled in with coloured pens, so it was highly visual, easily available for everyone to see and very motivating! It really caught everyone’s attention and meant that they didn’t even need to offer any rewards for their campaign.
Pauline says that working hard to involve the community and the people who used her services really drove the success of her crowdfunding campaign. Everyone was made to feel included – they were a part of the campaign and had a say in how it progressed, how it would look, what the delivery at the council deputation would be, who would read the deputation and who would speak to the councillors.
On her campaign page she was also very open and transparent about what the costs for running the centre were and how much money they needed to stay open. Everyone enjoyed being involved in the campaign – they were all part of something much bigger – and the team would be very keen to use crowdfunding to raise funds again.
And, to finish, a quote from Pauline to inspire other organisations needing to raise funding:
“Involving our families, parents and kids gave them a sense of inclusion, respect and responsibility to keep their centre open. We felt it was all for one and one for all, we can do better if we work together.”
