Phenomenal Response to Friendicoes Crowd Funding Campaign
After 36 years of service to animals, for the first time in it’s history Friendicoes was facing the real threat of closure. The debts accrued had reached a staggering amount of 80lakhs plus with shelter budget now touching 60 lakhs a month.
But to the pleasant surprise of everyone at Friendicoes, the facebook appeal for funds met with unexpected response with all media – social, print and digital reaching out to us and helping us take our appeal to the public in an even larger scale than we had hoped for.
Support started pouring in overnight!
This support came from people from all walks of life – students, businessman, doctors, lawyers, the media, and even government officials. Support borne of goodwill for an organization that has always put the cause first.
Next came crowd funding. We were suggested a lot of platforms but we went ahead with Bitgiving, started by Ishita Anand who was a volunteer at the shelter while in college. The campaign was designed by Blackticket Films who also made promotional videos to accompany our appeal to the masses.
No social platform was left out in an attempt to ensure the shelter doors stayed open – Facebook, Twitter, Thunderclap, Tumblr, Instagram – the campaign could be seen in every one of them. Within 24 hours of the Bitgiving campaign going live, the initial target amount of 20 lacs was met. It was one of the fastest trending campaigns online and is now a case study for crowd funding in Asia. In the next 30 days Friendicoes successfully raised 60 lakhs through Bitgiving. Ketto was the next crowd funding platform introduced in the campaign to receive help from our friends and supporters abroad. And we managed to raise another 10 lakhs through Ketto.With this kind of a support from public it is no wonder that Friendicoes managed to come out of this financial catastrophe and far quicker than we could have ever dreamt of. But unfortunately, we are still not out of the deep end. The funds collected helped pay off the debts, but Friendicoes needs sustainable fundraising to meet our monthly expenses. Without the support from the public we would not be able to do the work we do.