Halloween Fundraising for BCT is spooktacularly easy!

 

Lisbeth and colleagues celebrating Halloween

BCT member, senior ecologist and returning Halloween fundraiser - Lisbeth Nash, tells us how and why she chooses to have fun and raise much needed funds for the Bat Conservation Trust at Halloween.

 

 

Fundraising for the Bat Conservation Trust is great fun and super easy.  For the last two years here at my office at AECOM Cardiff,  I have hijacked Halloween to promote bats, their conservation and to raise money for BCT. Whilst, having fun with my colleagues.

Check out these Halloween 'treats'

Since 2011 we have held a Halloween cake sale and spooky bat quiz. Cakes are kindly donated by the office's 'Mary Berry's and Jamie Oliver's' and all we ask is that people donate a couple of shiny  doubloons, for a slice of cake, trick or treat sweets and entry to a batty quiz.

Two weeks before the big day I put up some of the BCT template fundraising posters - these are available to download free from the BCT Halloween pages. On the day I then adorn the office with Halloween decorations, BCT logos and bat fact posters .

When I first started fundraising for bats most people in our office hadn't  heard of BCT. But this year, without prompt, I have been ask to run the event again - it seems to be a firm "October" favourite. The event has even spread across the River Severn to our Bristol office!

Lisbeth uses Halloween to raising funds for BCT alongside dispelling bat myths

By sneaking a few bat facts and myth busters into the Halloween quiz hopefully the positive message for bat conservation is getting out there. It's great to see our engineers and consultants, some usually not enamoured with bats, get really concerned and competitive over whether there are 18 or 17 resident species of bat in the UK, if the bumblebee bat really is the smallest bat in the world or just a hoax name and if they can name three UK bat species - Battius Battus does not count! 

This Halloween why not see if you can dosomething similar or even more bat- tastic for bat conservation at  your office!

Lisbeth Nash
Senior Ecologist AECOM

Why not go batty for bats this Halloween and do some fundraising of your own - Simply visit www.bats.org.uk/halloween or email fundraise@bats.org.uk for information and advice.

Fangtastic Fundraising

As September drew to a close, and the weather got…hotter than it had been all summer, the Bat Helpline office at the Bat Conservation Trust licked their ice lollies and looked ahead to the end of October. Halloween being inextricably linked with bats already; it serves as an excellent opportunity to challenge the myths that persist about this charming mammal. But with all the spooky inspiration and ‘bat tat’ hitting the shops, it’s also a great time to throw a party in aid of bats. The fundraising team planned their Halloween Party Pack, and some staff took inspiration, volunteering to take up the challenge in their own time. The plotting began...

As we embarked with a careful mix of planning and optimism, and the sound advice of the party pack to guide us, it was clear that the first task was to find a venue. Helpline Officer David scoured the city for pubs, clubs and bars which a) didn’t charge for room hire and b) could be convinced to keep the bar take target low, to leave our guests with more money for the raffle, creepy cakes and bat badges (beautifully made by Anney Youngman, Scottish Bat Officer). With the date confirmed for Halloween itself, and Seasonal helpline Officer Jess established as ‘King of Decorating’ (n.b. Jess has no actual monarchic powers, she just likes to think she does), our next task was to get the word out.

Fantastic BCT pumpkin by Crystal Schintz

Despite being a fairly sociable bunch at BCT, after inviting all our friends it became clear we would need to advertise further afield if we were going to fill out the venue and put on the sort of party UK bats rightly deserve. As a result, we sent out an invitation to all BCT followers on facebook, as well as other wildlife groups we thought would appreciate a good old London knees up in honour of our furry flying friends. Slowly, the list of confirmed attendees grew, with nearly half those attending getting their tickets beforehand via our Justgiving page , and we breathed a collective sigh of relief. The rest of the tickets were sold on the door.

Another way that money was raised was via our bat raffle. The BCT office responded generously to the call for raffle prizes; they ranged from a number of bat themed items (wooden bat box, bat posters, cuddly toys) to the slightly more obscure (meerkat money box anyone?). All were well received, and special mention must go to Heather at BCT, who dealt well with the lack of a mic to call the raffle with the sort of lung capacity not normally associated with a dancing skeleton.

Anyway, back to the preparations… Having snared a minion in BCT’s Admin Assistant Sian (who is definitely a minion despite being significantly more learned in craft lore than Jess), Jess

arranged a pre-party decorating party at the BCT office, to take stock of the pound shop bat tat, horded decorations from previous years, and crafting templates which had accumulated around the helpline ‘bat cave’. Over wine and snacks, we painted cut-out bats; experimented with the idea of a ‘hook a bat’ game utilizing plastic long-eareds and corks; and stuck googly eyes to every available surface. Bea created a marvellous bat box for the silent auction; Dave (a crafting newbie!) made bat table cloths; and other staff offered to help with party ‘homework’.

The weekend before the party featured scary amounts of glitter, pumpkin innards and dry leaves (collected from Streatham Common for party floor decoration!). Bags of bat tat, boxes of prizes, and the kindly loaned DJ decks (thank you Psyche DJ !) arrived at Clerkenwell’s 1920 club during the day. By kick off a team of volunteers had stuck branches to pillars; hung beautifully crafted bats throughout; draped everything in fake cobweb; and were hurriedly tidying up.

In total, we raised almost six hundred pounds for bat conservation, earning a great sense of achievement and picking up some new craft skills on the way. As for the party, we’ll let the photographic evidence speak for itself!

If you ran a BCT bat fundraiser for halloween, you can send in your donations online!

Happy Halloween!

October 31st rolls around every year, and we know it’s all to do with witches, ghosts, costume parties, pumpkins, and most notably to BCT, bats. But do we know what it actually is all about? Originally, before we all got lazy with pronunciation, Halloween was known as ‘All Hallows Eve’ and referred to the day before All Saints Day. The Celts believed that this was the night that the gap between the human world and the spirit world was weakest, and they built bonfires to keep the evil spirits away. So that explains the ghosts. Jack O’ Lanterns derived from the Irish using light to keep away those who were stuck between life and death, and witches are believed to gather together on this night. Incidentally, if you want to see a witch at midnight on Halloween, you have to wear your clothes inside out and walk backwards all night. Let me know how that goes…


But where do bats feature in this? We’re genuinely not sure. Somewhere along the line they’ve got a reputation of flying around, sucking people’s blood and turning into caped Counts during the daylight hours. None of these are true. Apart from the flying around. I’ll give you that one. Yes, it’s true that there are vampire bats. But what the horror films don’t tell you is that they are no bigger than your hand-span, do not transform into ‘vicked vampires who vant to suck your blood’ and do not actually drink human blood, but cattle blood. Also, they don’t suck. When feeding on cattle they create a small cut in the cattle’s shoulder and lick up the dribbling blood. The cattle barely even notice. Blood sucking fiend and a danger to all human-kind? Hardly. Will they get tangled in your hair? Given the exceptional accuracy of their echolocation, this is almost impossible. Is the bat a useless rodent? (Pause for the audible gasp from the BCT office). Absolutely not. Not only are bats not rodents, but they are incredibly valuable as pest controllers and as pollinators. Some of our favourite things rely on the presence of bats – chocolate and tequila to name just two!


The Bat Conservation Trust assumes the responsibility of correcting all these myths about bats. This year we’ve been to Wildlife Xpo, and Bats and Spiders Weekend to do some myth-busting and raise the profile of bats. We’ve also been busy creating our fundraising packs and planning our Halloween parties. There are piles of crumpled bits of paper littering the office (all to be recycled!) as we come up with ideas, replace them, go back to them, and then start on a completely new theme.( Creativity takes time. And patience.) We’ve got some great ideas, and you know where to find them – our party pack is ready to download and if you need a hand post on our facebook wall. Get those apples covered in toffee, the pumpkins carved, the gingerbread bats baked and the house decorated. The costume looks great, the food is on the table and the guests are on their way. Happy All Hallow’s Eve everyone, don’t let the vampires bite!

A successful Halloween for bats

Fundraising & Membership Officer Harriet Henley talks about BCT's Halloween marketing campaign


So here we are in November with the discount pumpkins and rejected Halloween odds and ends being removed from the supermarket shelves and replaced with increasingly premature Christmas-themed aisles!

If you are one of our Facebook fans or Twitter followers, you will have undoubtedly been aware over the last week that Halloween is a big event at the Bat Conservation Trust. Every year we ask ourselves this question; should we do anything in recognition of Halloween and thus acknowledge the link between bats and this annual scare-fest? And every year we come to this conclusion; yes. Of course we should!
Bats are intrinsically associated with Halloween and as silly as this may be it’s not going to change any time soon. Bats are inevitably on people’s minds at this time so we try to use the build-up to Halloween as an opportunity to do some serious myth-busting and encourage people to embrace their furry friends that feature so prominently throughout the festivities. After all, we probably wont be seeing much batty action now until the spring, so why not give bats a good old send-off into hibernation by turning Halloween into a celebration of all things bat!?

That is exactly what some of you bat-fans have done, so I thought I'd share a couple of the things that people have done for bats this Halloween...

We had some fantastic entries to our Halloween competition; “Halloween night in the life of a bat”. There were comedic accounts, diary-esque entries and some impressive poetic feats. The competition was judged by our esteemed panel of expert judges… BCT’s very own Helpline, who decided that the deserved winner was Jennifer Duran from North Carolina in the USA. Jennifer’s fantastic poem describes a bat’s feelings about Halloween night and really echoes our mission this year to get people to celebrate bats at Halloween. (Read Jennifer’s poem)




On Twitter, Laura Thompson showed us some amazing bat lino prints that she’d made (pictured above). Laura says; “The prints are ATC (artist trading card) sized lino prints based on images from the royal mail mammals postage stamps. I basically did a sketch, transferred it to the lino, then cut it out and printed it. The image is a 'test' print and the second image is of the ATC's I made.”

An in another aesthetic twist Martin Roberts, a trainee bat worker in Dorset, launched his second album “Attack of the pipistrelles” at a pub in Bournemouth on Halloween. Martin will be donating all proceeds of the album launch to BCT for us to use for bat conservation – thanks Martin and good luck with the album!

And finally, check out Kazz Larkin's batty pumpkin carving, I think we'll all be following suite next year!

So all in all this Halloween has been a storming success, and people have really gone above and beyond to THINK BAT throughout the festivities. The highlight for me has been the amazing level of interaction and response that we’ve had from all you bat fans on Facebook and Twitter. So a huge thanks to all of you for getting involved this Halloween (and for tolerating our awful batty puns!)

Harriet Henley
Fundraising & Membership Officer

(Currently sitting in the bat cave, desperately trying to convert aforementioned puns into a Christmas theme – apologies in advance!)