Interesting project: Go For The Goal (any Canadian readers out there? :)

I came across this interesting project today. The site says:

“Go for the Goal is a crowd funding site under construction. It aims to help high performance athletes, in particular equestrians, raise funds from fans and other supporters. I am a journalist with more than 15 years experience and I want to use those skills to help athletes get their stories out. If you’re an athlete or a potential advertiser, please contact me.”

I am told this site might grow to include amateur riders too…

Click on image to go to the site

It would be great to see a similar initiative in the UK  for aspiring amateur riders and equestrian projects, don’t you think? 🙂

Related articles

• 10 Tips for Successful Crowd Funding (persephonemagazine.com)
• How to successfully crowd fund a project (o.canada.com)
• Kickstarter officially launching Canadian-based projects on September 9th (mobilesyrup.com)
• Tips for crowd sourcing (wp.pandarose.ca)

Emily King (Mary King’s Daughter) & Brookleigh Drama or How To Fight For What You Want

If you follow the eventing world a little bit you might have seen that the owner of Emily King‘s top horse, Brookleigh, decided to sell him…If you haven’t, I copied below Mary’s plead for help in creating a syndicate that would allow Emily to keep the horse.

Click on photo above to read comments

Then it turns out that a proactive teenager as Emily King is, she put together a poster which she used on her social media to draw more attention to the case and to find supporters.

I first saw the information on Emily King’s Twitter and thought ‘damn I hope they find someone to buy the horse’ . I then read comments online under various mentions of this news and those comments are the reason for this post.

Vast majority of feedback on Emily’s initiative had been of course positive but the not-so-positive part made me think ( I won’t cite all the comments here, if you are interested in the dynamics of equestrian community I do encourage you to have a scan through replies on Mary King‘s Facebook). You might also want to have a read on Horse & Hound Forum: Mary King’s daughter losing her ride on Brookleigh…..?

Some people thought using social media to raise money for syndicate was “unprofessional”, some that it was a scam, others that Mary King should have sold one of her top horses and buy Brookleigh for her daughter.  As I said, reading the comments made me think about more general use of publicity, gaining awareness and rising interest through use of the Internet powers and thought I would share my opinion.