Wildlife conservation is crucial for protecting the earth’s biodiversity and the ecosystems we all depend on. But with so many other demands on people’s money, and with conservation being a competitive field, it can be difficult to consistently raise funds. Especially for smaller organisations.
Innovation is key to attracting attention, engaging potential donors, and ensuring your conservation organisation continues to receive support and donations. Here we give you ideas and inspiration for how you can embrace innovative fundraising approaches to make sure your conservation fundraising efforts remain competitive and appealing.
Embracing Technology for Conservation Fundraising
New tech can allow you to reach broad audiences more effectively than ever, often with a significant return on your investments. You should consider:
Crowdfunding for Conservation Projects
Crowdfunding sites, like GoFundMe, Kickstarter, and Patreon, allow charitable causes to set up pages where supporters can donate online. Crowdfunding platforms can be an effective way of raising funds, usually for a large number of smaller donations. They can be quickly set-up, you can add engaging content and updates easily to the page, and links can be shared easily online via social media and email.
Like all your fundraising communications, you’ll need to clearly and succinctly explain what you’re raising funds for. Detail why it’s important, what impact contributions will have, and what the objective and the timeline are for the initiative.
Central to making crowdfunding work is crafting engaging narratives that resonate with your target audience. Try to create stories that evoke an emotional response, and that focus on specific, easily understood subjects. This could be the conservation of charismatic species or preserving specific habits.
Online Experiences and Virtual Reality
Whilst conservation fundraising is challenging, your subject offers plenty of advantages when it comes to creating engaging content. Animals and the natural world are appealing to many. And offering people opportunities to experience them can prove very popular.
You can take advantage of this by creating online experiences rich in imagery and videos, that give intimate insights into the lives of fascinating species or allow people to experience stunnings habits from around the world. Examples can include creating online safaris, a jungle excursion, a dive to a coral reef, or an adventure to the Arctic.
Virtual reality is becoming increasingly widespread too, with cheaper headsets now available, including smartphone headsets. VR offers you the opportunity to create even more immersive and engaging content, like virtual tours and exciting encounters with endangered species.
Online Fundraising Challenges
Online challenges can offer a fun and interactive way for supporters to engage with your charity and your work, leading to raised awareness and contributions.
You can kick-off challenges with posts and videos online, then use social media to promote them. Online challenges have the capacity to go viral and spread far and wide, for relatively little investment (remember the Ice Bucket Challenge?).
Examples of online challenges to consider, include quizzes and trivia challenges, photography contests, art competitions, and DIY conservation projects that supporters can do at home. Just remember to include simple instructions on how to donate to your charity, so if an online challenge does go viral, people can easily link back to your cause.
Experiential Conservation Fundraising Ideas
As well as using online approaches to connect and appeal to potential donors, you should look at ways that you can create exciting face-to-face, in-person experiences. These could include:
Wildlife Conservation Camps or Retreats
Donors can find guided nature excursions and camps to be tremendously exciting and rewarding. If you can offer people the chance to see new habitats and species up close, and to be guided through experiences by experts, it could do wonders for your fundraising efforts. Your ability to offer trips and excursions out into the wild will depend upon the specifics of your charity of course.
Excursions can require plenty of planning and work, but due to how attractive they are, they can be valuable fundraising endeavours where supporters may be willing to offer substantial contributions. Whilst trips to conservation projects abroad, in far-flung exotic locations can be extremely attractive, excursions to interesting locations throughout the UK can be equally as enticing if framed in an appealing, innovative way.
Adventure Fundraising for Conservation
As well as excursions and camps, adventure trips can also be attractive, high-value opportunities to raise funds that combine your supporters’ love of wildlife and conservation with specific interests or adventure activities.
As with camps and excursions, the opportunities you can offer will depend on the specifics of your organisation. But ideas for potential outings appropriate for conservation include sponsored hikes, wildlife photography safaris, adventure biking races, mountaineering trips, and kayaking and white-water rafting.
Community-Engaged Fundraising Ideas
Nature, wildlife and conservation can be fascinating topics that members of the community will be more than happy to become involved in, offering you opportunities for collaborative projects, both one-off and ongoing. Consider the following:
Community Citizen Science Projects
Citizen science initiatives, where members of the public can contribute towards scientific projects, have proved extremely popular, with notable examples being Zooniverse, Project Feederwatch, and GLOBE.
Thoughtful and interesting citizen science projects can engage the broader community in conservation work, often across the world. Members of the public can help with conservation work, but they also donate through participation fees or sponsorships.
Central to making citizen science projects appealing is to ensure they’re simple to use and contribute to, whilst being able to clearly demonstrate the positive impact of people’s work.
Local Art Collaborations
Art and conservation fundraising have a long history of being paired together, and working with local artists can be an impactful way to raise funds for your organisation. Possible collaborations can include photography and art exhibitions, auctions of wildlife-themed art, or creating merchandise with community artists.
In any collaboration, it’s important that the artists involved receive equal exposure for their work as your charity. The artists should also be recognised and appreciated by your charity. You’ll also need to get a formal revenue-sharing agreement in place that all parties are satisfied with.
Corporate Partnership Fundraising Ideas
Corporate partnerships can be a valuable source of fundraising and support for your wildlife conservation initiatives. Partners from the corporate world may have considerable resources and expertise to offer you. On the other hand, those businesses can benefit from increased awareness within your audiences, and from public relations opportunities.
As well as activities like corporate sponsorship, innovative corporate partnerships can include:
Conservation Corporate Challenges
Challenge and team-working events are popular with many companies. You can offer environmentally-themed team building corporate events to local businesses, such as corporate sports tournaments, adventure races, or eco-challenges.
Sustainable Product Partnerships
You may have opportunities to partner with businesses to produce co-branded products or merchandise. This could include clothing or you can make eco-friendly versions of popular products, like sustainable reusable takeaway coffee mugs, bags for life or water bottles. You could even opt for unique items, like wildlife-inspired jewellery.
Make sure you seek partners who have the capabilities to produce the products in question, and who have established sales platforms. You should also agree upon how the revenue generated will be shared. You can promote co-branded products and merchandise through both of your promotional platforms.
Maximising your Fundraising Impact with easyfundraising
When it comes to fundraising innovations, easyfundraising can provide you with a unique, distinctive way to raise continuous funds for your conservation projects.
We offer a way for supporters to raise money for charity with their regular online shopping. Donors can register with easyfundraising, and when they shop online with our more than 7,500 partner retailers, those retailers will donate a part of what they spend to a charitable cause that’s registered with us, at no extra cost to the shopper. We’re an easy-to-use, cost-effective way to raise money for charity.
You can use easyfundraising by registering your fundraising initiative with us as one of our charitable causes, and then encourage your supporters to donate to you by joining and using easyfundraising. You can easily integrate easyfunding donation links into your online communications and social media posts to share them widely.
The Power of Innovative Fundraising
By thinking outside the box and using innovative approaches to conservation fundraising, you can help keep your charity visible and keep potential donors engaged. It can also help you secure consistent and valuable streams of donations, often with a considerable return on your investments.
What works best for you will depend on the unique situation of your organisation, but consider embracing new technology, building experiential initiatives, and seeking opportunities to engage community and corporate partners.
You can find out more about how easyfundraising works and how you can use it to offer an alternative low-cost way for your donors to support your conservation work. Then simply register your fundraising projects with us to get started.