Hear from Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs, our crowdfunding alumni as they share their experience of developing the Bridge to Crystal Palace Dinosaurs project through Crowdfund London. The Mayor of London contributed £30,000 to help Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs reach their Crowdfund London target of £69,980 in 2018.
Tell us a bit more about your crowdfunding idea and how it came about
Safe, secure access to the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs sculptures is vital for conservation monitoring, repair and grounds maintenance to protect this magnificent Grade-1 listed historic site. As a local heritage asset, we are also keen to enhance community volunteering and outreach opportunities. All this was made significantly more challenging when the original bridge to the islands was removed in 2017. A temporary bridge was provided, and this required assembly each time it was needed. It was not free to use, and our small charity was not able to sustain this long term. We needed a replacement bridge and had no idea how we would afford it.
What inspired you to apply to Crowdfund London?
In summer 2018, we discussed the possibility of using Crowdfund London to achieve our aims of creating a new bridge. We had only a short time to pull together an application, and managed to submit it on time. We were attracted by the idea that crowdfunding would give members of the community the opportunity to feel ownership of this new addition to their park.
Lessons learned from the campaigning process
We began the campaign by asking for small donations of £2 per person. This was a deliberate tactic to ensure that we received enough support to convince the Mayor’s Office of the importance of our project to our community. Social media was the main way that we campaigned, using Facebook and Twitter to draw attention to our request for help and share our Spacehive page.
Your experience of engaging local communities to gather support for your campaign. How did you go about this? Please provide some key tips and ideas.
Rather than ask for money directly, we asked for help with the crowdfunding and people in the local community came up with imaginative ways to raise funds. We sold Christmas cards featuring a local artist’s paintings of the Dinosaurs. A local fitness group ran around the residential areas, posting flyers about the campaign.
We received hundreds of small pledges, and this was enough to clinch a £30,000 pledge from the Mayor of London. We had another £35,000 to raise during the remaining four weeks. To do this, we held a charity auction using donated items. However, everything changed when, with three weeks to go, we approached Slash from Guns and Roses and asked for an auction item. Slash has a special place in his heart for the Dinosaurs, having seen them as a child. When he shared our Spacehive link, interest in the project exploded. Suddenly, people in the local community were thrilled to be associated with this rock guitar legend and so were we!
We reached our target with twenty four hours to go after an anonymous donor pledged £3,333!
What impact has the project had to date, where are you now and how are you looking to evolve?
Just over two years after we achieved our crowdfunding goal, the Dino Bridge has been designed, engineered and fabricated. On Monday 1 March 2021 we used it for the first time, to allow access for a TV crew commissioned by Historic England. We have received wonderful feedback from the community, and whilst working on site this week I chatted with a local who told me that part of the bridge was his because he pledged to the crowdfunding campaign.
Photography by Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs