As part of my job as Marketing Manager I am also in charge of fundraising for the company. In meetings with the rest of the group we discussed many ideas to raise money for our company that would also be great ways to advertise for our company. The first idea we had was to do a sponsored ‘stay awake’ for 48 hours, this was because sleep deprivation is linked to madness and we wanted to see how sleep deprivation would affect us as performers and incorporate that into our show. Unfortunately, due to health and safety reasons we were not able to do this fundraiser because of our Universities concerns surrounding the dangers of not sleeping. The next idea we had was to do a sponsored bike ride from Lincoln to Nottingham, this 45 mile ride would have been completed by myself and one of our performers (Jacob Toon). We would set up another Go Fund me page as well as the one we already had to initially receive funding and collect donations in advance for this ride, to keep our audience updated with the ride we would live-stream this on Facebook and Twitter. This ride was all planned and a couple of days before I was going to start advertising and collecting donations, my bike was stolen and the police were unable to trace it so with great regret we had to cancel this fundraiser. With time running out we called an emergency meeting the day after my bike was stolen and decided to hold a sponsored 24 hour ride on our up-cycled bike that featured in our show and an exercise bike. For the location we chose to use a platform outside our University library, theatre and students union as we felt this would be the place with the highest exposure. Choosing the day on which to do it was also important, we decided to start at 12 noon on Wednesday and finishing 12 noon on Thursday, this meant that we would catch a lot of University students working in the library as well as cycling through the SU night, ‘Quack’. As well as cycling for a continuous 24 hours as a company, we were selling up-cycled flowerpots from old tin cans, we filled these with soil and planted a seed and sold them for £2. These flower pots also featured in our installation at the beginning of our performance, it was our plan to make the audience feel as part of our world as possible and these flowerpots aided that. I originally thought that this fundraiser would generate around £50 for the company; however much to our surprise and delight we actually raised £214! This amount of money meant that after talking to our producer, no other fundraisers were needed thus freeing up more time for the company so we could focus on rehearsals. Throughout the sponsored cycle, we had lots of interest from members of the public asking about our theatre company and show, which I believe, helped us in selling as many tickets as we did for our show.

24hr Bike Ride