Viking Genes Fundraising Committee

The fundraising committee were committed to help raise funds after attending Professor Jim Wilson’s talks on the Viking Gene Project.  Professor Jim Wilson spoke so passionately about the impact of the Viking Gene findings for the population of Shetland and the future population of the isles.  Many of the committee are from the isle of Whalsay which the Viking Gene Project identified as having a higher risk of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 variant (1 in 49) which can cause breast, ovarian and prostate cancer. Myself (Laura) has Wilson’s Disease which is one of the rare gene variants found to be more common in Shetland, a thousand times more, compared to the Scottish mainland.  Many folk from the Westside of Shetland are keen to get involved due to the high neurological impact of illnesses. The committee believe it is important for the whole of Shetland to be screened for these rare genes, identified by the Viking Gene Project, so preventative measures can be taken, and it can directly impact future generations.  We believe “knowledge is power!”

We chose to do an online auction because some of the committee members had been involved with ones before and they can raise a lot of money.  We met a couple of times and volunteered for different roles to ensure the running of the auction went smoothly.  We all contacted different folk and business’ we each knew personally to ask if they would be willing to donate to the auction.  We were all amazed by the generosity of the Shetland community and secured 240 different items!  This ranged from weekend accommodation in self-catering, boat trips, party experience, baking, knitwear, boxes of fish etc.  We promoted our auction page on Facebook by asking people to ‘share’ it and invite their friends to the page.  We also had a News item in the local newspaper and it was advertised on Radio Shetland.  The auction went live on Friday 8^th November at 8am and closed at 6pm on Sunday 10^th November.  We had great interest in the auction with 1,500 people visiting the page over the weekend.  Once the auction closed the real work began for the committee in contacting the 240 winning bidders and organising collection of money and ‘lot’ items.  The final total we raised for the auction was £15,787.

Ensure you have a good number of people on your committee so the workload is manageable. However not too many as this can lead to not being able to agree on things due to lots of different opinions.  The fundraisers need to have good communication with each another and the public with advertising the fundraising event.  Try and keep it lightsome, our IT whiz Leona Wishart was amazing at gearing us all up and keeping it light-hearted.