A short summary of your project

Hi there, thanks for reading! If you haven't come across Poltimore Festival before, we're a project run by a group of around 40 student volunteers that looks to celebrate the music, theatre and arts communities in Exeter, while raising money for the restoration of Poltimore House. Having rebranded last year and seen our biggest audience yet, we're now needing to raise £2500 to ensure the running of this year's festival, and to guarantee it can become a sustainable community project in the future.

Who are you?

My name's Tristan - I've been the lead on Poltimore Festival for the last 2 years. I was initially invited along to perform a poetry reading when the Festival was known as Arts on the Move. Myself and a few other performers on the day fell in love with the House, and when we heard that the project wasn't going to continue, wanted to do all we could to sustain its momentum, and to get as many students and members of the community engaged with work that's being done to restore one of the county's most historic and beautiful sites.

Your story

The festival is completely unique in Exeter - its focus is on all artistic scenes within the South West, offering a shared platform for student and local communities to come together. At the same time, the festival places a prerogative on local and independent food, drink and entertainments, creating a greater visibility for everything the South West can offer in every department. The merchandise is sourced and created by a independent Exeter start-up company, and even the ticketing platform we use was created by a recent graduate at the University of Exeter. The entire project is a celebration of the wonderful creative and entrepreneurial work that comes out of the county.

If you are kind enough to be a donor on this project, you will be having a huge impact to an organisation that refuses to cut corners and costs, and values the vibrancy of the local community and everything that it has to offer. Being entirely student-led, without the backing of any large charities or organisations, these donations will sit also to assure that any commercial liability doesn't sit with the creators of the project, or with people giving their time to help the project succeed. You will be directly impacting the local creative scene in Exeter and the South West, and we're very thankful for it.

Where will the money go?

The costs associated with such an ambitious project aren't light. If we reach our target, with every penny donated matched by the University of Exeter's Annual Fund, the funds will go a long way to support our ambitions in their entirety. This includes staging and technical support, subsidising travel costs for our audience to attend the festival and general site logistics such as fencing, waste disposal and portaloo hire. A brief outline of our outgoing costs are as follows:

• Entertainment costs: £2425
• Tech, staging and equipment hire: £2500
• Online publicity costs: £95
• Physical publicity and printing costs: £250
• Physical production costs: £1250
• Logistics costs (facilities): £294
• Transport costs: £450
• Wristband costs: £240
• Power supply: £740
• Budgeting contingency: £820
• Total costs: £9064

Before the Festival we've sold over 300 advance tickets, pitches to local producers and suppliers securing around £4,000. We expect to sell around 150 more tickets, a total of around £2,000.

Raising our target of £3,000 in donations will ensure the festival can continue each year and continue supporting Politmore House.

Rewards

• We have some great rewards to thank all of our donors, including tickets to the festival on Sunday 28th May, as well as being listed as one of our executive producers and friends of the festival. Your name will be included on our exclusive friends line-up poster, as a thank you to all who have donated.

Find us here

Find us on Facebook /PoltimoreFestival, Twitter @PoltimoreFest and Instagram @PoltimoreFestival. We're also online at www.poltimorefestival.co.uk .

Help us succeed!

• We need as many people as possible to be talking about our project. You don't need to give money to help us succeed! Please share this project with anyone you think would support us – on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, by email, telephone, in a chat over the fence or on your blog. Everything is truly appreciated.
• In fact, share it with everyone you know as we think it's a great idea, and the more people who know about it, the more likely we are to make this work out brilliantly.
• And we know we said you don't need to give money to help us, but we'd love it if you did! Please sponsor us and help make this happen.

With love and thanks,

The Poltimore Festival Team