Helen Buckland of Sumatran Orangutan Society shares her charity’s light-hearted approach to the serious business of saving orang-utans, and share her top tips on how you could set up a similar campaign yourself

“What has your chin got to do with orangutan conservation?” That’s the question we posed to our supporters earlier this year when we launched a new community fundraising campaign. The answer is: quite a lot.

If you look up ‘Great Apes’ you’ll find that it’s a family – in fact, it’s our family! We share 96.4 per cent of our DNA with orangutans, but we’re pushing them to the edge of extinction. The Sumatran Orangutan Society (SOS) works to protect orangutans and their rainforest homes, by supporting frontline conservation programmes and campaigning on issues threatening the survival of the species in the wild. We’re a small charity with a big impact, and even bigger ambitions.

We wanted to launch a community fundraising campaign that would be fun and engaging, but with a serious message: that orangutans are one of our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, but urgently need our help if we are to stop them disappearing forever. Growing a beard is something that all male apes can do, so we felt that calling on men around the world to release their inner apes and grow a facial forest was a natural fit for SOS. And so Ape-ril was born…

Stubble vision

Sponsored facial-hair-growth isn’t a new concept. We’ve all heard of the global phenomenon that is Movember, and when we decided to launch Ape-ril, we also discovered several other campaigns along the same lines – Decembeard and Februhairy among them. The fact is, it’s not always necessary to re-invent the wheel when it comes to fundraising; by adapting tried and tested concepts to fit your cause and supporters, small charities can avoid the kind of risks that come with attempting something completely new.

This approach isn’t totally without risk, however. This was our first year of running the campaign, and we hadn’t previously done a great deal of community fundraising, so we didn't know whether our supporters would get excited about this particular method of showing their solidarity with orangutans. We needn’t have worried though, as we had a fantastic response, and overwhelmingly positive feedback.
We also found that it wasn’t just men who found Ape-ril appealing. While it’s always a good idea to have a target audience in mind for a campaign, it doesn’t hurt to ensure anyone who wants to can get involved. We therefore suggested that women and children could join in by wearing a fake beard for a day, a week or even the whole month, and were delighted when one female supporter decided to paint on a different beard every day (rainbow stripes was our favourite). Our youngest ever OranguFan, Maisy in Australia, even wore a fake beard on the day she turned six months old!

Furry friends

Finding a friendly famous face to front your campaign has obvious benefits, especially if they are a credible ambassador with a genuine interest in your cause. Bill Bailey has been a Patron of SOS for many years, and has a long-term passion for wildlife, conservation and Indonesia. He also happens to have a distinctive beard – so he was the perfect frontman for Ape-ril. Bill’s involvement undoubtedly helped us increase the number of people who heard about it and signed up – a single one of his tweets about the campaign was retweeted more than 600 times. Comedians Tony Law and Dave Brown also lent their faces to the campaign, with Dave growing a Viking-esque beard on our behalf and sending in regular photos for our ‘Hairy Hall of Fame’ gallery.

Social media played a key role in promotion – it’s a great (and free) way to get the word out to a wide audience. Asking celebrities via Twitter to retweet a post on your charity’s behalf is especially effective – it costs nothing and only takes a second of a celebrity’s time. Stephen Fry, who has a huge following on Twitter, retweeted the campaign, which led to another big surge in sign-ups. We also posted a short promo film on YouTube featuring our Ape-ril Ambassadors – a cost-free action that any charity can take to help raise awareness of their cause.

To make sure the campaign stood out from our regular work, we built a campaign microsite (www.Ape-ril.org) using Everyday Hero’s Heroix platform. This cost us nothing, other than the transaction fees on the donations. Everyday Hero held our hand throughout the process of creating the site, but it was actually really straightforward and user-friendly – you don’t need to be a technical genius to get a fully branded, customised fundraising website up and running in an afternoon.

The site was used to run competitions as extra incentives for our fundraisers, including ‘most amusing photo’ and ‘best beard topiary’. The prizes weren’t expensive – the T-shirts signed by our campaign ambassadors and a fantastic piece of orangutan artwork donated by primate artist Hellen Bersacola were really well received. We also encouraged people to form teams of ‘beardy buddies’ to swap beard-grooming tips and offer each other support when it got to that itchy stage.

We wanted to help participants raise as much as possible in sponsorship and so, with help from Joe Mateo at domecreative.com, we created a bespoke Ape-ril fundraising pack, including a cut-out orangutan beard, a ‘Beard Guide’ for inspiration, posters, a Facebook banner and an avatar that people could download to help them promote their participation. Having eye-catching and engaging design can be crucial when trying to recruit new supporters to take part in initiatives such as this. This is especially the case for small charities, as new and potential supporters may not know much about the work of the organisation, so you need to grab their attention and make them want to find out more. I’d really recommend sites like Pimp My Cause and the volunteering section of Charity Choice to find pro bono design and marketing support if you don’t have these skills in-house.

On the money

The results of all our efforts certainly paid off, with more than 140 people agreeing to go wild for SOS in Ape-ril. While this may seem like a small number compared to the hordes of people who take part in Movember every year, we were delighted with the total raised – almost £18,000, which is a significant sum for a small charity with an income of around £100k. This was such a simple and cost-effective campaign that we’ve decided to make it an annual fixture in our fundraising calendar.
You don’t need a big budget or a big team – a bit of creativity and knowing where to find free tools and support can help even small charities to launch a successful campaign that can grow each year. So what are you waiting for?

Helen Buckland is director of the Sumatran Orangutan Society