Patreon
A few years ago MyOutdoors wrote a rather nice review about ShAFF. They called it 'the friendly festival'. This is testament not only to the team that delivers the event, but to the community of people who support it. Many of these people are understandably from Sheffield - it’s The Outdoor City - but many travel each year from all over the UK. Matt Heason, founder of ShAFF, long held the desire to have a proper Friends Of The Festival scheme to acknowledge this community and to give it the means to support and engage with the festival aside from simply coming along in March.
Long-time ShAFF friend, supporter and now team member Paul Diffley from Hot Aches Productions shared about Patreon, a crowdfunding platform which can be used for projects like this. Supporters can opt in to make micro payments in return for benefits, and become loyal fans year-round.
It would have been easy to simply offer a package of discounts, deals, and prizes in return for support, but Matt wanted to use the 'friendly festival' as a starting point and not a goal and work on growing the community base with a more ambitious aim.
Sheffield is an awesome city, but it's by no means perfect. At the time, Matt read a recent article that pointed out the massive disparity between the south west and the north east quarters, with huge differences in life expectancy, education and opportunity. Each year we get a healthy number of kids at the festival, but it's a tiny fraction of the overall population. We want to share the often-life-changing inspiration that the films give, with schools from every corner of the city and so, we now use the money from the scheme to take the films to the schools and help educate the kids of The Outdoor City exactly what they have on their doorstep and inspire them to get out there; to use it, to value it, and to protect it.
Please take five minutes to look at it and consider contributing.
If you like it, then please also share it and get your friends, family and followers interested too. If you'd like to support the scheme with pledges of your own to add to the list of benefits then let me know.
Below is a list of the Patrons who are currently supporting SHAFF, and we thank you from the bottom of our hearts for doing so:
Amy Hutchins
Anne Green
Beth Rawson
Catherine Hammond
Charlie Charlston
Chris Holcroft
Chris Pembroke
Claire Thorpe
Fiona Outram
Graham Richards
Hal Roberts
Hayley Boyce
Iain Armstrong
Jane Campbell
John Follin
Johnie Tidwell
Jonathan
Jordan Coupland
Juan Varela
Kev Robers
Leon Ballin
Martyn Werner
Matthew Drake
Michael Jones
Neil Birchenall
Nigel Smith
Nina Achol
Northern Aspects Film Festival
Phil Roberts
Robert Topliss
Robert Werner
Sheila Bhati
Simon Gladding
Terry Gallagher
Toby Rhodes
Tom Hall
Tony Day
Val Murthy
Wendy