Soaring to success: We reached our €30,000 crowdfunding goal for Autumn 2025
Less than three months ago, on December 14th, we re-launched our crowdfunding campaign to fund the upcoming autumn count of 2025. Since 2021, we have successfully funded three autumn counts through our dedicated crowdfunding efforts. As we already accumulated a significant financial buffer for 2025, we decided to continue with the crowdfunding to raise the amount needed to continue our important monitoring work in the Batumi bottleneck. Now, we are delighted and proud to announce that — thanks to your incredible generosity once again! — we have reached €30,000 to fund our work in the upcoming year!
Since we already had a buffer from the leftovers of previous seasons, and with grown confidence from the previous successful crowdfunding campaigns, we decided to increase our target this year to €30,000. With €5,000 more to spend, we primarily want to reduce financial barriers for participants from lower- and middle income countries. It has been a long-held wish to reduce the daily participation fees, so we can start welcoming more volunteers again from the Caucasus and wider region. Our commitment to providing Georgian participants with free participation remains unchanged.
Uniquely, we had already formed a team of coordinators for Autumn 2025 well before the end of 2024 — for the first time the count will be led by an all-women team of coordinators, consisting of some of our most experienced veterans. Now, funding was the only barrier that remained before opening the call for counters and running the count several months later. Given the past successful campaigns, we were optimistic about the support from the community, yet perhaps slightly nervous to relive the rollercoaster of going through another crowdfunding campaign.
We launched the campaign just before the Christmas and New Year holiday season, and donations began to pour in rapidly. Soon after, we already hit the €25.000 mark! While trying to keep the attention going through social media and our newsletter, the rate of donations slowed down quite a bit. That quickly changed when we announced our brand-new webshop! The subsequent spike in attention and merchandise orders helped to raise our crowdfunding bar significantly! Fast-forward to early February when we experienced another boost with very gracious donations, bringing us tantalisingly close to our goal. Then, our friends at NatureWalks organised a raptor identification course and donated the proceedings to our project! With that final €390 donation, the tension relieved as we breached the €30.000 mark!
In total, we raised no less than €30,054 during the past few months! This funding allows us to confidently proceed with the 2025 Autumn count. The enthusiastic response to our crowdfunding campaign has made us feel hugely supported by the international birdwatching community once again. We hope we will be able to rely on that support in years to come. After all, and despite ongoing efforts to secure more structural funding, our monitoring work will continue to depend on your generous support for the foreseeable future.
That said, thanks to your support the immediate future looks bright, and we are excited we’ll be able to organise another outstanding count with many old-time friends and new volunteers next autumn. Didi madloba!
P.S. Save the date! Our call for counters for Autumn 2025 will be opened soon on March 15th, make sure to follow our socials and subscribe to our newsletter to not miss anything!