How Kijana Kwanza raised over £11,000 through its Mount Toubkal Challenge

The story

About Kijana Kwanza

Kijana Kwanza (Young People First) is a grassroots project located in Moshi, Tanzania, focused on equipping children and young people with the skills and opportunities to create a future free from poverty.

With a team of 38, the charity sponsors over 200 children and young people, most of whom are orphaned, abandoned, or from single-parent families. These individuals live in the community, in foster care, or at one of the charity’s children’s homes or youth hostels – funded by the donations they receive. Most of the children attend school or are enrolled in vocational courses, while some participate in apprenticeships or work-shadowing in local industries.

In addition to formal education, Kijana Kwanza offers an extensive program of extracurricular activities that emphasise soft skills development, leadership training, and digital inclusion.

The Kijana Kwanza team ahead of scaling the mountain

The need

Funding a new children’s home in Tanzania

A key part of the charity’s work is reinventing the welfare model for orphaned and abandoned children. As part of this focus, Kijana Kwanza has recently purchased a 1-acre plot in the Shabaha District, with the aim of building a new children’s complex. With a lofty ambition to fulfil, the charity needed to find as many ways as possible to raise funds for the project.

The idea for the Mount Toubkal challenge came from one of the charity’s supporters – an avid trekker, who had climbed North Africa’s highest mountain 12 months prior. He’d done so over the course of two days with the help of a mountain guide and felt a team of fundraisers could do the same for Kijana Kwanza.

But to turn the idea into a successful fundraising event, some structure and a fundraising platform was needed. The charity wanted fundraising pages that could be branded with the charity’s logo and colours, that were customisable to include details of the event and had the ability to track everyone’s fundraising activity in one place.

That’s where the Enthuse Fundraising solution fitted the bill.

A brilliant challenge that was matched with excellent fundraising results

The Enthuse approach

The Mount Toubkal Challenge

With any fundraising campaign, the first thing you want to do is make it your own – and this challenge was no exception. All fundraising pages for the Mount Toubkal challenge were branded in the charity’s colours and showed the charity’s logo at the top for all to see. This was something Kijana Kwanza was keen on, as it helps to build brand recognition among donors and in turn leads to repeat givers in the future.

Another benefit of using Enthuse is the communal fundraising page that gets set up for events, as was the case for the Mount Toubkal challenge. In addition to participants’ individual pages, the main fundraising page for the event showed the overall total raised, as well as the number of donors and fundraisers. This helped the charity to easily keep track of the campaign’s success as a whole, as well as individual fundraising performance.

The team on brand en route

Ultimately, a fundraising page is only as strong as a charity or fundraiser makes it. That’s why the ability to customise these pages is so important for helping to secure donations. Kijana Kwanza is a brilliant example of a good cause that has utilised the ‘About’ section of the fundraising page to great effect.

The charity used the space to describe the event and how the funds would be used to build a new children’s home in Moshi, Tanzania. And they also used imagery to help tell their story. The charity posted photos of the trek route, an artist’s impression of the new children’s home as well as an intervention model and a link to download its brochure on community-based care. Sharing this kind of information is a great way to keep people informed and inspire donations.

What’s more, the participants also made good use of the ‘updates’ section on their fundraising pages. The top fundraiser posted progress videos, including a ‘thank you’ video from the summit – a brilliant way to add a personal touch, show donors what had been achieved and close the loop on the event.

Finally, the leaderboard functionality meant fundraisers could easily see how much their fellow participants had raised, helping to spur them on and create healthy competition to raise even more. The charity also managed to secure £5,000 worth of match funding from the Beta Charitable Trust which was another way of encouraging participants to smash their fundraising targets – as they knew the donations they received could be added to by the Trust.

The charity included a mockup of the children’s home on the communal fundraising page

It was really helpful to have the ability to customise the ‘About’ section so we could share as much detail on the event and how we’d spend the funds as possible. It was great to see our fundraisers posting video updates too.
Sarah Bibi – UK Outreach Worker, Kijana Kwanza

Results

Over £11,000 raised!

Kijana Kwanza made brilliant use of the Enthuse Fundraising capabilities for their Mount Toubkal Challenge. And unsurprisingly, this led to some fantastic results.

The charity raised over £11,200 through the event to help fund its new children’s home – a brilliant total, particularly when this was achieved through just 8 fundraisers.

This meant that on average, each fundraiser raised a very healthy £1,400 and the top fundraiser managed an incredibly impressive £4,290.

The charity and its trekkers made great use of the Enthuse Fundraising platform; providing written updates as well as photos and videos to showcase the fantastic challenge and what the donations would help to achieve.

The goal was clear and the impact was tangible, leading to some excellent results for the charity.

Having the fundraising pages branded to our cause was a nice way to make sure we were front of mind for donors.
Sarah Bibi – UK Outreach Worker, Kijana Kwanza