Raising money for legal costs

Many UK chapters use CrowdJustice as an online platform to raise money. Mike from UK Legal has written this useful guide on how to set up CrowdJustice for your local group.

A few important notes:

• you can't guarantee that you will cover the fines of someone who got arrested. Otherwise, their fine might get higher. But once a rebel has received a fine, you can case by case and budget allowing, consider covering it in all or in part.

• if you don't have a bank account yet, you can use a central XR UK bank account (see in the document)

This is what Evin from XR Hackney had to say about their campaign on CrowdJustice:

We just set a stretch target of £1,000 per arrestee so 8k total. Their actual legal costs could be more like £2k each, but we just don’t know.

The first hours and day are crucial. Having the list of 10-20 people donate immediately really helped. We had £1,700 in first hour and around £3,000 by end of first day. After that it tails off, we got £200 today, so £3,200 from 90+ people in total. That was from going out to a mailing list of 1,700 members.

So aiming for a target of at least 5% of however many members you send it out to donating an average of £30 each seems like one way you could estimate a realistic goal.