Active Together Sport England Crowdfunding Zoom Meeting

Durham County RFU is happy to be brining Clubs together to discuss the opportunity for the Active Together Funding. A Durham County Club volunteer, Caroline, has kindly agreed to host a meeting to tell us all.

The meeting will be taking place on Monday 30th November, 7pm. If you would like to attend the meeting please email dcrfu@rfu.com for the link.

Further information from Caroline:

Active Together is a Sport England crowdfunding initiative aimed at helping sports clubs set up and run a crowdfunding campaigns to help sustain themselves through the coronavirus (Covid-19) crisis, ie. bridging the financial situation, planning a safe return to play or club development. From a new pot of £1.5m they will offer clubs a financial pledge of upto 50% to a maximum of £10,000 towards their campaign target, with some simple criteria to meet in order to draw down the pledge and ultimately the funding. The Sport England application is a simple process and their team are extremely supportive and responsive; they want clubs to succeed.

Our view is that in these difficult times we need to help each other, and its great that the County can facilitate this. Whilst we don't profess to be Active Together experts we have been through the process of planning and managing a campaign and are very happy to share our experience - what we wished we'd known at the outset, what Sport England are looking for and what has worked well for us - with any clubs thinking about launching a campaign of their own.

We are just about at the mid-point of our campaign and so far have raised 93% of our target, but have seen other benefits too, including a real sense of engagement within our membership which has been really important during this period of lockdown. It does take work to set up and run a campaign, but the shared sense of achievement, the funding and the added benefits are definitely worth it !