Edinburgh Zoo raised £76,863 in 14 days by turning a private night at its own zoo into a prize draw

On 2 March 2021, with Edinburgh Zoo barely reopened after more than 5 months of pandemic closure across 2 lockdowns, the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland put its own zoo up as a prize: the building itself, after hours, opened up for 1 winner and 3 guests. The Crowdfunder campaign closed 14 days later having raised £76,863 from 4,654 supporters at £5 an entry. The winner was drawn by computer on 17 March.

The prize was a thing nobody could buy at any price. The winner got the entire zoo to themselves from 6pm to 10pm on a date of their choosing, fed the animals (the campaign dangled the lions, the tigers and the famous giant pandas), took a personally guided behind the scenes tour with RZSS chief executive David Field, had dinner in the zoo's Mansion House, and finished with an overnight stay at the Caledonian, Edinburgh's Waldorf Astoria hotel, which partnered on the draw. Almost all of that came out of assets RZSS already owned: its site, its animals, its keepers, its chief executive's evening. The marginal cost of the core prize was staffing a night.

Most charity prize draws start with a procurement problem: find a prize good enough to sell tickets against, then persuade someone to donate it. RZSS skipped it, because an attraction with a gate and animals behind it already owns the scarcest prize in its market: access nobody else can grant. The £76,863 was raised at a moment of genuine crisis (the closure had cost the charity more than £2 million, against a food bill of over £60,000 a month) and it was raised fast, unrestricted, and from thousands of people rather than 1 funder. RZSS then ran the same mechanic again across both its parks for at least 4 years; that story is told at /draws/rzss-repeat-draw-programme/. This page stays on the first draw, and on the details of it the programme view leaves out.

At a glance

• Raise: £76,863 for RZSS, the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (Scottish registered charity SC004064)
• Supporters: 4,654 in 14 days, funded 16 March 2021, winner drawn 17 March 2021
• Platform: Crowdfunder, on the charity's own Crowdfunder account
• Mechanic: paid entry prize draw, £5 per entry, bundles at £20 for 5, £40 for 10 and £100 for 25, with the free entry route as the legal compliance layer
• Prize: exclusive after-hours access to Edinburgh Zoo (6pm to 10pm, winner plus 3 guests), feeding the animals, a guided tour with the CEO, dinner in the Mansion House, and a partnered overnight stay at the Waldorf Astoria Edinburgh, The Caledonian
• Context: pandemic recovery; the closure had cost RZSS more than £2 million, with a £60,000 a month animal food bill; the campaign promised 100 per cent of ticket fees would go directly to feeding the animals
• Afterwards: the model was repeated across RZSS's 2 parks; 8 verified draws are compiled at £201,908 in our programme case

What the draw was

A single prize, one campaign, a 14 day window. People entered by buying £5 entries on Crowdfunder, with discounted bundles encouraging multiple entries. The draw closed at 23:59 on Tuesday 16 March 2021 and the winner was selected by a computer process the next day. Entrants had to be 18 or over, and the prize was redeemable until 30 September 2022. Full terms sat on the zoo's own website rather than the campaign page.

It is a paid entry prize draw. The product being sold is paid entries, and every element of the page (the £5 price point, the bundle ladder, the "100% of your ticket fee will go directly to feed the animals you love" promise) is built to convert them. The free entry route that sits underneath draws of this kind exists because UK law requires it to keep the draw outside the Gambling Act 2005. It is compliance plumbing, and none of the page sells it.

One structural detail worth noticing: RZSS ran this draw itself, on its own Crowdfunder account, and not through a celebrity supporter or third party fundraiser. The charity owned the audience, the asset and the campaign. That matters for what follows.

The prize

Strip the prize down and it has 2 layers. The core was pure own-asset: the zoo after closing time, the animals, the keepers, the Mansion House, and 4 hours of the chief executive's evening. None of that had to be bought, negotiated for, or shipped. It also could not be bought by anyone else, which turns the usual economics of a prize on its head: the prize with the lowest marginal cost to the operator was also the prize with the highest scarcity to the entrant. Edinburgh Zoo sells admission every day; it does not sell the building at night. The draw monetised the gap between those 2 facts.

The second layer was the partnered topper: 2 rooms for a night at the Caledonian, with breakfast and spa access. We have not found a public statement of the commercial terms between RZSS and the hotel, so we will not claim the rooms were gifted, but the structure is the familiar one of a luxury brand attaching itself to a beloved local institution's moment. What the hotel element did do was round the experience into a complete story (the magical night, then the 5 star bed) and give the campaign a second brand to borrow credibility from. It was garnish, though.

There was also a small piece of craft that is easy to miss: every entrant, win or lose, was promised a thank you film of the pandas and their keepers. For £5, nobody walked away with nothing. That converts a £5 entry into a small act of belonging, and it costs the operator one video.

Si's review of the live campaign also noted a warm, simple explainer video fronting the page, helping entrants visualise an experience that, by definition, no photograph of a past winner could yet show. For an unprecedented prize, that visualisation work is doing real selling.

The audience and the moment

The honest version of this case has to account for who saw it, because the reach was not a normal one. Edinburgh Zoo is one of Scotland's best known visitor attractions, with a membership base, an adoption programme and a social following our records put at over 400,000 across channels. That was the starting point, and on its own it does not explain the number. The draw launched into a news cycle about the zoo's pandemic losses, complete with a Scottish Government plea to China over the cost of keeping the giant pandas, so the zoo was already in the national news the week it went live. Local press covered the launch. And the £60,000 a month food bill gave every £5 entry a concrete, emotional job: feed the animals you love.

So the draw did not create demand from nothing. It converted existing affection, at a moment when that affection was primed by crisis and the press was already pointing at the zoo, through a mechanic that gave people something thrilling in exchange for helping. David Field, the RZSS chief executive, framed it exactly that way at the time: supporters had been fantastic through the closure, and the draw was a way to "thank them by giving them something to really look forward to".

The numbers say the conversion was efficient. The average supporter contributed £16.52 (£76,863 across 4,654 supporters), more than 3 times the single entry price, which points to the bundle ladder doing a lot of the work, though Crowdfunder supporters can also top up above the entry price, so the average does not isolate it. That is a derived figure (our arithmetic on the campaign page totals), but the inputs are primary.

What you cannot do is read £76,863 as the going rate for an after-hours draw. The size of the raise came from how many people saw the draw in 14 days, and in March 2021 that was a large warm following plus a national news moment. A smaller attraction starts with a smaller list. Whether it ends with a smaller reach depends on the prize being one the press will run with and on who else will put the page in front of their audience. RZSS's own later draws show what the mechanic yields in calmer times, and that is the planning evidence.

What happened next

Night at the Zoo was the first of a series. RZSS ran the same mechanic at Highland Wildlife Park that spring (£41,270), then against a sculpture trail, a departing pair of pandas, a cheetah, a newborn pygmy hippo and a rescued lynx. We compiled the 8 draws with individually verified final totals at £201,908, and the table, the dates and what a smaller attraction should plan from are all in our programme case. The short version for this page: the mechanic held its shape every time, the numbers tracked how many people each draw reached, and the channel outlived the crisis that launched it. The pygmy hippo draw in late 2024 has nothing to do with lockdown.

What attraction and charity teams should take from this

1. The best prize you can offer is probably not for sale. RZSS sells admission every day and does not sell the building at night, and the draw monetised the gap between those 2 facts. Any site with a door it locks owns the same gap. The 4 kinds of own-asset prize, and what they look like without animals, are set out in the programme case.

2. Give the money a job. Every £5 here had a concrete destination: feed the animals you love, against a food bill the press had already reported. An entrant who does not win still knows what their £5 did. On a draw for an attraction, say plainly where the money goes and make it something a person can picture.

3. Build the bundle ladder; the evidence points to it doing much of the work. The average supporter gave £16.52 against a £5 entry price, and the page made 5, 10 and 25 entry bundles the obvious upgrade. The average cannot separate bundles from top-ups, but a draw priced only at its single entry would have needed nearly 3 times the supporters for the same raise. The ladder costs nothing to add.

4. Nobody walks away with nothing. Every entrant was promised a thank you film of the pandas and their keepers, and the page carried an explainer video for a prize no photograph of a past winner could show. Each cost the operator a video. Both are the kind of detail that makes a £5 entry feel like joining in rather than buying a ticket.

What this case study doesn't claim

• We do not claim £76,863 as a planning baseline for an attraction prize draw. The raise rode a famous brand, a large warm following and a national news moment. RZSS's own later draws (£6,230 to £41,270) are the more transferable reference points.
• We do not claim the Waldorf Astoria element was donated. The hotel is described on the campaign page as a partner; the commercial terms are not public.
• We do not claim the exact count of subsequent RZSS draws. The 8 individually verified draws are compiled in the programme case; the figure of 12 or more is The Prize Draw Company's record of the operator's Crowdfunder activity rather than an enumerated public list.
• We do not know who won, and no supporter-level data beyond the campaign totals is public. The £16.52 average contribution is our arithmetic on the page's displayed totals.
• We keep this campaign fully separate from 2 near neighbours that press coverage sometimes blurs into it: The Cheeky Panda's £50,000 donation, which went to a different RZSS crowdfunder launched on 16 March 2021, and the Win Your Own Giraffe draw, which is a separate 2022 campaign with its own case study and its own figures.

Sources

Verified 2026-06-12. Reliability noted where it matters.

• Crowdfunder campaign page, "Win a once-in-a-lifetime night at Edinburgh Zoo!", at crowdfunder.co.uk/p/nightatthezoo. Live page is Cloudflare protected; figures taken from the Internet Archive snapshot of 17 May 2025 (web.archive.org/web/20250517184452), which displays "On 16th March 2021 we successfully raised £76,863 with 4654 supporters in 14 days", the £5 entry price, the bundle ladder, the full prize description, the closing and draw dates, and the redemption deadline. Primary source. Si's first-hand read of the live campaign page (final totals as displayed) matches at £76,000 rounded.
• RZSS Edinburgh Zoo news announcement, 2 March 2021, "Win the keys to Edinburgh Zoo for a night", at edinburghzoo.org.uk/news/article/19113 (via Internet Archive snapshot of 2 March 2021). Primary source for the launch date, the £5 ticket price, the more than £2 million closure cost, the £60,000 a month food bill, and David Field's quotes. Self-reported, reliability High for its own campaign mechanics.
• Edinburgh Evening News, 16 March 2021, "Charity funds boost for Edinburgh Zoo following Scottish Government's plea to China", at edinburghnews.scotsman.com (via Internet Archive snapshot of 26 May 2022). Independent corroboration: quotes David Field stating the prize draw "raised more than £70,000" with the winner announced that week, and establishes that The Cheeky Panda's £50,000 went to the separate experiences crowdfunder. Reliability High.
• Edinburgh Evening News, March 2021, "Edinburgh Zoo launch prize draw for once-in-a-lifetime exclusive after hours experience where the winner can feed the animals", at edinburghnews.scotsman.com. Launch coverage; paywalled or blocked on fetch, headline and indexing verified in search engines only.
• Crowdfunder campaign page, "Win an exclusive night at Highland Wildlife Park!", at crowdfunder.co.uk/p/NightAtHighlandWildlifePark (via Internet Archive snapshot of 5 September 2025). Source for the £41,270 raise, 2,511 supporters, funding date of 31 May 2021 and the Macdonald Aviemore Resort partnership. Primary source.
• Crowdfunder campaign page, "Win! Feed a giant panda, February Draw", at crowdfunder.co.uk/p/feed-a-giant-panda-february-draw (via Internet Archive snapshot of 1 January 2026). Source for the £13,805 raise and 1,250 supporters. Primary source.
• RZSS Edinburgh Zoo news, 1 February 2023, "Win the chance to feed a giant panda", at edinburghzoo.org.uk/news/win-chance-feed-giant-panda. Source for the monthly draw series running February to June 2023.
• Crowdfunder campaign page, "Win a baby pygmy hippo experience!", at crowdfunder.co.uk/p/baby-pygmy-hippo-experience (via Internet Archive snapshot of 24 May 2025). Source for the £17,420 raise, 1,337 supporters and the 18 November 2024 funding date. Primary source.
• Scottish Charity Register (OSCR), entry for the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland, charity number SC004064, at oscr.org.uk. Source for charity registration. Reliability High.
• Crowdfunder UK Help Centre, "Prize Draws", at help.crowdfunder.co.uk/en/articles/5367006-prize-draws. Source for the platform's prize draw product and the role of the free entry route.