Holly Hagg Working with Growing Together

Holly Hagg – Working with Growing Together

This case study highlights how Holly Hagg, a community and wildlife project in Sheffield has benefited from working with the Growing Together initiative.

Claire Gregory, founding member of ‘Holly Hagg’ in Sheffield first came across Growing Together (GT) when she attended a workshop, led by Sophie Antonelli at a Permaculture Convergence in 2016. She immediately interested in what support GT could offer.

Holly Hagg began in 2012, after Claire bought a three acre field in order to set up a community food and wildlife project using Permaculture Design principles. In its second year, a constituted unincorporated organisation called Friends of Holly Hagg was set up, with a committee, members and volunteers. Since then the project has developed a good infrastructure with tree planting, ponds, vegetable garden and alpacas.

Claire said: “Holly Hagg has a great presence in the community, holding Family Open Hours throughout the summer (alpaca feeding, pond dipping and seasonal berry tasting) and has now started alpaca trekking through the local lanes and bridleways. We are able to fund our activities from these events and are increasingly attracting youth groups and school visits. We are excited about developing the educational side of the project, particularly with children.”

As with all projects, some issues were encountered. The first was around trading as an unincorporated organisation and understanding the personal risks being taken by not forming a more official organisation. Secondly, Claire (as the owner of the land and the ‘instigator’ of the project), held much of the responsibility for the project. Claire understood that in order to be a genuine ‘community’ project, there had to be a group of people helping make decisions about the project, sharing the responsibilities and contributing a range of ideas.

Through Growing Together, Claire sought advice about her legal structure and was taken through all the different options – from a Community Interest Company to the idea of gaining charitable status. Eventually she decided to register as a company limited by guarantee, which is quick and easy to do – this enables Holly Hagg to trade, but it ensures that she is not personally liable for any issues.

GT also provided Claire with ideas around volunteer recruitment and management. From sharing ideas about how to promote roles at Holly Hagg, to sending Claire templates of policies and procedures other organisations had used, GT is able to draw on best practice so that small grass root organisations don’t have to ‘reinvent the wheel’ at every stage of development.

Claire followed through with advice and was industrious about engaging people with diverse skills onto the management committee. Recruiting individuals with skills around working with young people, community development and permaculture design brought invaluable experience onto the board and helped shape the next stage of the plan – sustainability.

Holly Hagg has two very clear aims – to engage community (especially children) in nature, wildlife and alpacas and to be sustainable. From the outset it was felt that grant funding was not the immediate aim. The feeling was that grant funding can be an unhelpful culture, making groups project driven and working to short term funding cycles. They also feel strongly that they can make themselves sustainable and that while there is great need elsewhere for grant funding, they themselves could avoid drawing on these resources.

The main business idea lies in the Alpaca trekking; charging customers for the guided nature walks and using profits to fund free educational activities back on site. The Alpacas also contribute to life back at the ‘ranch’, they provide excellent meadow management, munching on the grass etc, and their waste provides brilliant compost! They also add to the engaging atmosphere of the sloping site - everyone loves to watch the Alpacas wandering around the fields and splashing in the pond.

Holly Hagg were finding that the the Alpaca treks were increasingly popular, receiving 5 star reviews on Facebook and slowly building up a customer base. Quirky seasonal offers, such as a ‘couples’ Alpaca trek on Valentine’s Day, helped to create an online buzz.

Holly Hagg recognised the need to bring in some new animals to grow the business. Claire and her team were interested in launching a crowd funding campaign; they had a unique concept (crowdfunding for Alpacas!) and the requisite traction on social media to be successful.

GT helped here by commissioning Marketing and PR professional Sonya Sanghera to help the team put together a robust plan. Crowdfunding is as much about creating positive publicity as it is about raising cash. A successful campaign relies heavily on being prepared and having a plan, including ideally knowing where a good chunk of your money is going to come from, good quality rewards for the pledges people make, what promotion you can do offline, as well as online. Sonya helped the team look at their key messaging and media platforms – how could they build on what they had done?

Claire and her team took full advantage of their growing profile and Sonya’s expert steer – opportunities from local media such as the Sheffield Star, BBC Radio Sheffield and The Tab enabled their message to go viral and interest grew.

As a result, Holly Hagg became so busy with requests for Alpaca treks, that they made the collective decision to drop the crowdfunding campaign as revenue from treks alone were enough for their plans and a waiting list for ‘Alpaca treks’ meant that the organisation was financially solvent without the need to fundraise. Sonya quickly rejigged her support – feeling it was much more honest and authentic to the group to focus on strengthening what they already had in place, i.e. their website and Facebook page.

They have not totally abandoned the idea of using crowdfunding in the future – perhaps to raise money for specific projects, such as a classroom onsite. However, for now, they are concentrating on delivering the Alpaca treks off site and educational experiences onsite. Claire says of her experience of working with GT:

‘Stage One was to build up the trekking business to provide our financial stability. We gave ourselves all of 2017 to achieve this, but thanks to Sonya's excellent guidance and good fortune on the social media going viral we achieved this goal in under three weeks! When Sonya came for the final day I felt very unhappy about the prospect of a campaign claiming we needed money to pay for the two new alpacas when it was obvious we were flooded with income. We are now earning £400 per week so the boys are paid for within a month. After a short discussion (which I didn't force!) everyone agreed the Crowd Funding was no longer appropriate.

“What we did instead with Sonya's final day of support was really valuable and helped us see our way forward to Stage Two which is to network with far more groups and individuals who can make use of our services and to improve on the content of the website and the way we present ourselves through all the media channels.

“We are so grateful to GT for this support. It has allowed us to handle what happened professionally and take full advantage. I hope we will appear on your statistics as one of your great success stories! We are happy that you can take credit for what happened.

Our current position is that I am no longer spending all my hours doing manual bookings. We are booked up for several weeks now with four walks a week. The online booking system got held up by integration with a payment system and that's now resolved. We have about 250 people on a mailing list ready to be pointed at the online booking system so that should fill up the places for several months and gives us a good contact list for future promotions. Treks are going well and we have 45 reviews on Facebook - all 5 stars. I'm having the time of my life!”