‘I have tried raising money by asking for it, and by not asking for it. I always got more by asking for it’ - Millard Fuller

I’ve done that thing again. You know the one…where I forget to blog? That. This time I really do have a good excuse, and I’m going to tell you a little bit about it.
My English course offers a ‘Short Story’ module, in which we have the opportunity to write creative pieces of short fiction – approximately 2,500 words. For several years, those who have taken the module have compiled anthologies of their work which they can keep as a memento, as well as passing on to those who will take the module in future. This year, my course-mates and I have decided that we want to keep up tradition and publish our own short story anthology. Of course, this is a somewhat costly venture, and unfortunately there is little funding available from the university, so we have been working our socks off fundraising!
The first big thing we did was to host a quiz at the local bar where we held a raffle at the same time, which had a real mixture of prizes! The raffle prizes came from a variety of places. Some of them we purchased ourselves (we didn’t want to do this too much, of course, as this would work out very expensive!), and some of them we were kindly given by local businesses after some glorified begging! The evening was a huge success, although unfortunately I didn’t get any photographs of the event because we were all so busy (also, I forgot!) we managed to raise over £100 doing this.
The following day, after a huge amount of baking by several people (including someone’s sister, who officially makes the most gorgeous cupcakes!), we held a bake sale. ‘Bake sale’ seems like a very American term, doesn’t it? However, it’s the best way to describe the sale of baked goods! The only photograph I took of our cake stall was after it had been pounced on my several large purchases, which I certainly shan’t complain about, but it does mean that our table began to look sparse!

We actually had two cake stalls running concurrently in two different buildings but, before long, one of the stalls had sold out so we merged together. Luckily the good luck continued, and we sold everything we had made!
This added to our fundraising pot by a further £100, but we still have a fair way to go. To tide us over until our next hair-brained fundraising scheme, we have signed up to Kickstarter. For anyone who doesn’t know, Kickstarter is a website dedicated to creative projects. People can ‘pledge’ to donate anything from £1+ and then if the group reaches their target, they receive the money towards their project. This means that if the target isn’t met, the group doesn’t receive any of the money but it’s okay, because it also means that in that instance, anyone who has pledged money doesn’t need to pay anything. It’s almost like a no-win no-fee kind of thing. Of course, for us, that wouldn’t be too great as we really want to get this book published. If you could pledge anything at all to our anthology, it would mean an awful lot and would take us a step closer to getting our anthology published: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/87527503/short-story-anthology-0

Who knows what ideas we will come up with next?! If you have any suggestions which would be easy for us to do, then please let me know, as we are all final year students and trying to fundraise as well as do lots of other things! Thank you :)