I can’t quite believe it is all over! We are thrilled to have raised a whopping £3970 from our Operation Circus crowd funding campaign to go into our pot to raise £15,000 needed for a new rigging system for the circus space in Kings Heath. Here is a round up of the whole of Operation Circus!
Operation Circus started from a meeting between myself (Joe) and a very good friend and student of CircusMASH (Halo) in Moseley. We came up with the idea to raise the £15,000 we needed for a new rigging system for the space in Kings Heath.
By October we were well into all of the organising of the campaign and had set 20th October as our launch date. As launch date approached we were busy organising the launch party and all of the communications. The time between June ’15 and October just seemed to fly by and we just didn’t have enough time the in day to do everything we needed to! The 20th soon rolled around!
The Pin up style launch party in the space went down a treat! People came dressed up, we had performances, workshops, music, dancing and food and we were thrilled to start Operation Circus with a BANG! On Day one we managed to raise around £700.00! Read more about the launch party here.
Week one was introduction week! We wanted to introduce our campaign to the community and let everyone know what we were doing and what we were raising money for. After coming up with the name ‘Operation Circus’ we got our thinking caps on… and then came the theme…
Our Campaign Message.
Get some more information about DAY ONE:
Joe’s Launch Day Blog
BBC WM Radio Interview
People that pledged to Operation Circus could pick a reward, anything from training packages to hoodies, photo shoots and lots of other goodies. We had a fab Tshirt designed by the lovely TigerBam. See it here.
On with the campaign! On day four we had raise £1175.00 and we released our first commercial. We’d never had any commercials made so imagine our excitement when we were planning it. Here is commercial number one. Read about the making of our commercials here.
We had lots of fun in week one! Then came along week two. Week two was all about ‘Why Circus’. Why we do circus, and why we think that circus is fantastic for our community.
Here is our introductory video to Why Circus week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjLDjZAbZ2M
Information to read: Here is director Joe’s account of why he does circus, and why he started CircusMASH.
We interviewed three students to understand why they do circus. This is Halo, Halo managed to train herself to walk again after being told she would as an auto immune disease took hold and paralysed her from the cheek bones down. Now she can be seen flying around in the air with CircusMASH.
Watch two more student stories:
Meet Lizzi. Why Circus.
Meet Katie. Why Circus.
At the half way point on day 14 we had managed to raise £2500 from 37 backers… and then came WEEK 3: Gameshow week. Over the week we got people involved on our Facebook page by playing games. Who doesn’t love a good gameshow eh? We kicked the week off with a little message from Brian Conley…
Gameshow week came and went and here is a story that was generated by one of the games! Before we knew it we had one week left. Here is our final commercial to celebrate the start of ‘Celebration Week’ and the final week of the campaign.
We finished off the last few days of Operation Circus by celebrating Circus in Birmingham and The Future of CircusMASH. Read about both of these by clicking on the links above.
Through our four week campaign we managed to raise a whopping £3970 from 68 backers. It is a fab starting point for us to raise the rest needed to get to our £15,000 goal for the aerial rig. This year we kicked off Operation Circus at ‘The CircusMASH Challenge’ back in August and raised just over £500 from that. So adding that to Operation Circus money- we are well on our way.
There is only one thing left for me to say and that is a huge thank you to EVERYONE that has been involved in Operation Circus from organising to helping out to pledging. It absolutely could not have been done without you. Here is our Name & Fame list of everyone involved! Lots and lots of love as always.
The CircusMASH Team x