RZSS raised £201,908 across 8 prize draws using its own animals, access and naming rights as the prize

The Royal Zoological Society of Scotland has run 8 prize draws we can verify across Edinburgh Zoo and Highland Wildlife Park since 2021, and between them they raised £201,908. The prizes cost RZSS a staff rota. The rest of this page shows the working, then sets out what an attraction with no animals can take from it.

RZSS never had to solve the problem that starts most charity draws, which is finding a prize good enough to sell tickets against. It already owned the scarcest thing in its market: access nobody else can grant. The zoo after hours. A feeding session with the keepers. An evening of the chief executive's time. The right to name a newborn animal. Each of those costs the operator close to nothing and cannot be bought anywhere at any price. And the stock renews itself: every new arrival, rescue story or viral moment is a fresh thing to draw against. A baby pygmy hippo called Haggis. A rescued lynx. A departing panda.

Every one of these campaigns is public on Crowdfunder, so the series gives us something rare: the same operator, the same platform and the same mechanic, run again and again with different prizes and different audiences. We compiled the £201,908 by reading the individual campaign pages. The table is below so you can check the arithmetic yourself.

At a glance

• Beneficiary: RZSS, the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland, Scottish registered charity SC004064, operator of Edinburgh Zoo and Highland Wildlife Park
• Compiled raise: £201,908 across 8 individually verified prize draws, our compilation from the individual Crowdfunder campaign pages. RZSS does not publish a programme total
• Span: 2021 to 2025, across 2 sites
• Mechanic: paid-entry prize draw on Crowdfunder, £5 entry where verified, with bundle ladders and a free postal route as the legal compliance layer
• Prize model: the attraction's own assets, after-hours access, animal Magic Moments, CEO-hosted tours, animal naming rights, a trail sculpture, with partnered hotel stays as toppers
• A 9th draw, kept separate: a 2022 polar bear cub naming draw reported by RZSS at over £70,000, and by Civil Society at nearly £25,000 in its first week. We could not read its final campaign-page total directly, so it sits outside the £201,908
• Deep dives: the flagship is at /draws/edinburgh-zoo-night-at-the-zoo-2021/ and the auction-plus-draw structure at /draws/rzss-giraffe-about-town-2022/

The compiled total, with the working shown

The £201,908 is our compilation, summed from 8 individual Crowdfunder campaign pages, 5 of them read first hand by Si on the live or archived pages and 3 carried across from our existing verified cases. Here is every component.

Draw	Site	Raised	Supporters	Approx. year
Night at the Zoo	Edinburgh Zoo	£76,863	4,654	2021
An exclusive night at Highland Wildlife Park	Highland Wildlife Park	£41,270	2,511	2021
Win Your Own Giraffe (Giraffe About Town)	Edinburgh Zoo	£26,685	1,902	2022
Feed a Giant Panda, February draw	Edinburgh Zoo	£13,805	1,250	2023
Feed a Giant Panda, May draw	Edinburgh Zoo	£6,230	514	2023
Win a cheetah and friends prize	Edinburgh Zoo	£12,010	702	2024
Win a baby pygmy hippo experience (Haggis)	Edinburgh Zoo	£17,420	1,337	2024
Win the chance to name a rescued lynx	Highland Wildlife Park	£7,625	497	2025
Total	2 sites	£201,908	see note	2021 to 2025

The arithmetic: 76,863 + 41,270 + 26,685 + 13,805 + 6,230 + 12,010 + 17,420 + 7,625 = 201,908.

We do not publish a supporter total for the programme. The per-draw counts are incomplete, and many people will have entered more than one draw, so a raw sum would count them twice. The per-draw counts are shown where we have them.

On dates: the earliest draw funded in March 2021. The panda draws were a monthly series from February to June 2023, a farewell to Yang Guang and Tian Tian before they returned to China; we read the February and May final totals first hand and those are the 2 in the table. The other monthly editions ran too, but we did not capture their totals, so they are not added. The pygmy hippo draw is November 2024, launched within days of Haggis's birth on 30 October 2024. The lynx were captured in the Cairngorms in January 2025, settled at Highland Wildlife Park by May, and the naming draw ran around then. The cheetah draw is dated August 2024 from Si's reading of the campaign page; we found no press to pin it more precisely.

How a draw like this runs

Someone pays from £5 on the Crowdfunder page for a chance to win. Bundles make it cheaper to buy 5, 10 or 25 entries; on Night at the Zoo the average supporter spent £16.52, so most bought more than one. The attraction keeps the money and puts it where it says it will. Night at the Zoo promised every ticket fee would go to feeding the animals.

A free postal entry route sits underneath. It exists because UK law treats paying for a chance to win as a lottery unless a genuinely free way in exists, and a lottery would need a licence. Almost everyone pays. The free route keeps the draw legal, and none of these campaigns sells itself on it.

A campaign like this runs for a few weeks. Night at the Zoo and the pygmy hippo draw each ran 14 days. Terms and conditions are published before launch, the winner is drawn at random after the close, and the prize is redeemed on a date that suits both sides. There is no licence to apply for and far less admin than a society lottery.

The attraction's job while the draw is live is to get people to the page. Its own newsletter and socials first, then the press, then anyone with an audience who will share it: a hotel partner, a sister site, a fan page. Once people are on the page, a good prize converts them. How many people get there decides the total. This is the work we do with attractions, and it is described at /for-attractions/.

The own-asset prize model

The best prizes RZSS offered were never in a storeroom. Strip each one down and the same shape appears: a core that is pure own-asset, sometimes with a partnered topper bolted on.

The core is access RZSS already controls. The whole zoo after closing time. A keeper-led feeding session, branded as a Magic Moment, with a panda, a cheetah, a pygmy hippo or a lynx. A behind the scenes tour hosted by the chief executive. The right to choose the name a newborn animal will carry for the rest of its life. For the giraffe draw, an 8-foot sculpture that had already been made and paid for. None of this had to be bought, negotiated for or shipped. Its marginal cost to RZSS is a staff rota and an evening. And none of it can be bought by anyone else, which turns the usual economics of a prize on its head: the item with the lowest cost to the operator is also the item with the highest scarcity to the entrant.

The toppers are the partnered layer. An overnight stay at the Waldorf Astoria Edinburgh, The Caledonian on the flagship. A Macdonald Aviemore Resort stay on the Highland draws. An Eden Locke aparthotel night and a city dinner on the giraffe draw. We have not seen the commercial terms behind these, so we do not claim they were gifted. What they do is round each prize into a complete story, the magical access then the comfortable bed, and lend the campaign a second brand. They are garnish. Nobody entered these draws for the hotel room.

The reason this is a whole case rather than a footnote is that the prize stock renews itself. A charity that wins a donated prize once has to win it again next year. RZSS's inventory renews with the life of the parks. A new arrival, a viral moment, a rescue story, a departing favourite: each is a fresh scarce thing to draw against, generated by the ordinary business of running a zoo. The pygmy hippo draw is the clearest example. RZSS noticed it suddenly owned public adoration of a baby hippo, and ran the play again inside a fortnight.

What this looks like without animals

A zoo has an unfair advantage: its prizes are born, rescued and go viral on their own. A museum, gallery, observatory or historic house has none of that, and it is easy to read this page and conclude it is a zoo story. It is not. Every one of the 4 kinds of prize RZSS used exists at a site with no animals in it.

The building after closing. RZSS's flagship was the zoo from 6pm to 10pm with nobody else in it. Every attraction with a door it locks at night owns the same thing: the galleries after the last visitor has gone, a private tour of the site with the lights low, dinner in a room the public only ever walks through, a night under a roof nobody is allowed to sleep under. Admission is for sale every day. The building at night is not, and that gap is the prize.

Time with the people who run the place. 4 hours of the chief executive's evening, a keeper explaining an animal to one family. At a museum that is the curator opening a store room, the conservator's bench, the astronomer at the telescope, the archivist and a box nobody has asked for in years. It costs an evening of someone's time and it cannot be bought.

The right to name something. RZSS sold the naming of a polar bear cub and a rescued lynx. Anything a site is about to open, plant, restore, hang or launch can carry a name: a bench, a room, a boat, a telescope, a tree in the grounds, a new gallery's first exhibit.

An object the site already owns. The giraffe draw's prize was an 8-foot sculpture from a trail that had already been made and paid for. Trail pieces, retired signage, a de-accessioned print, a piece made on site: things with a story that a shop could not put a price on.

The renewal point holds too, in a slower rhythm. A zoo's stock renews with births. A heritage site's renews with the calendar: an anniversary, a reopening, a new exhibition, a restoration finishing, a season the site is famous for. Each of those is a moment the public is already looking at, and each is a fresh reason to run the draw again.

What scales, and what depends on RZSS

The mechanic held its shape across every draw. The absolute numbers tracked how many people each draw reached, and the prize budget had nothing to do with it.

The flagship Night at the Zoo made £76,863. It launched into peak pandemic sympathy, off a famous brand with a social following our records put at over 400,000, with national press covering the zoo's losses. The identical mechanic transplanted to the smaller, more remote Highland Wildlife Park made £41,270. Single-experience draws in calmer times made between £6,230 and £17,420. The mechanic worked all the way down the table; what changed was how many people saw each draw while it was live.

That is worth reading carefully, because the easy conclusion is "you need 400,000 followers", and that is the wrong one. What reached the entrants was RZSS's own list and socials, yes, but also the press, and moments the public was already looking at for another reason. A smaller attraction has a smaller list. It does not have to have a smaller reach for a fortnight, if the prize is one journalists run with and partners are willing to share. Plan from the £6,000 to £17,000 rows, then work out who can put the draw in front of people who have never heard of you.

There is one more thing the audience does not fully explain. The panda May draw made £6,230 against the February draw's £13,805, off the same animals at the same site 3 months apart. Novelty fades. The first draw against a given asset captures the peak of attention, and later draws against the same asset return less. A repeating programme is a way to keep harvesting attention as new assets arrive, and each individual asset's pulling power decays after its first outing. That is a planning lesson in its own right.

The 9th draw we are not adding in

RZSS ran a prize draw in 2022 to name a polar bear cub at Highland Wildlife Park. The winner chose the name Brodie from a keeper shortlist, with the proceeds funding Scotland's Wildlife Discovery Centre. RZSS reported the draw raised over £70,000. Civil Society News reported it at £24,185 from over 1,500 supporters at £5 entry in its first week, with the draw closing on 17 March 2022.

We have not folded it into the £201,908. The 8 draws in the table are each backed by a campaign-page read showing an exact final total. The polar bear draw's final figure reaches us only as RZSS's rounded "over £70,000" and Civil Society's in-flight "nearly £25,000"; the Crowdfunder page itself is bot-protected and we could not read its final total. So it sits here as a real 9th draw without adding an unverified number to a verified total. If anything, it tells you the £201,908 understates the programme. The verified 8 are a floor.

What attraction teams should take from this

1. Audit what you already own before you procure anything. RZSS never bought a prize that mattered. Any organisation with a physical site, restricted access, or people the public would love to meet already owns an unbuyable experience: the museum at midnight, the depot tour, the lifeboat launch, the cathedral roof, the right to name something. The test is whether it exists anywhere else at any price. If the answer is no, you have a prize whose scarcity is absolute and whose cost is a staff rota.

2. Treat the first draw as a prototype for a channel. RZSS's real return is a proven, repeatable mechanic run across 2 parks for 4 years and compiled here at £201,908. The second draw is cheaper than the first: the terms exist, the page template exists, the audience has learned that entering is normal. If a first draw works, the question is what this looks like as an annual or quarterly rhythm anchored to whatever scarce asset the year provides.

3. Forecast from your reach and from novelty decay. The £76,863 rode a famous brand, a six-figure warm audience and a once-in-a-generation crisis. Most operators are on the £6,000 to £17,000 rows. Even a strong operator sees later draws against the same asset return less than the first, as the panda series shows. Plan for the realistic row, plan for the second draw against a given asset to undershoot the first, and the programme still stacks up because the prize costs almost nothing.

4. Let a free, public moment be the shop window. Several of these draws sat on top of attention RZSS was generating anyway: a citywide art trail, a newborn animal in the national press, a rescue story. The cheapest top of funnel a draw can have is a moment that draws a crowd for another reason. The draw turns attention you were going to generate into income.

What this case study does not claim

• The £201,908 is our compilation from 8 individual Crowdfunder campaign pages, shown with the per-draw table so it can be checked. RZSS does not report a programme total, and the 8 are the draws we could verify with a final figure. RZSS has run others, including the 2022 polar bear naming draw, so the total is a floor.
• We do not publish a supporter total, because the per-draw counts are incomplete and many people entered more than once.
• Where a detail is unverified we say so above rather than assume it: entry price on 3 of the draws, the exact date of the cheetah draw, and whether the partnered hotel stays were donated.
• The flagship Night at the Zoo (£76,863) is covered at /draws/edinburgh-zoo-night-at-the-zoo-2021/ and the giraffe draw (£26,685, kept entirely separate from the £246,000 auction) at /draws/rzss-giraffe-about-town-2022/. This case zooms out to the programme and does not restate or contradict those.

Sources

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

• The 8 per-draw totals and supporter counts: read by Si from the live or archived Crowdfunder campaign pages, 2026-06-12, and cited throughout as the final total as displayed on each Crowdfunder campaign page. The 5 draws read this session are the February and May editions of the monthly Feed a Giant Panda series, the cheetah draw, the pygmy hippo draw and the lynx draw. The Night at the Zoo (£76,863), Highland Wildlife Park night (£41,270) and giraffe (£26,685) figures are carried from our existing verified cases. Primary observation.
• The compiled £201,908: The Prize Draw Company's arithmetic across those 8 pages, shown in full in the table above.
• Feed a Giant Panda draw series, dating and £5 entry: RZSS Edinburgh Zoo news, "Win the chance to feed a giant panda", edinburghzoo.org.uk/news/win-chance-feed-giant-panda, dated 1 February 2023; states monthly draws from February to June 2023, plus a panda-themed grand prize trailed for the summer, pandas Yang Guang and Tian Tian, with the pandas due to leave for China as early as late October 2023. Confirms the draws are 2023 and that the series ran monthly across several editions, of which we read the February and May final totals first hand. Self-reported, reliability High for its own mechanics.
• Rescued lynx draw, dating: RZSS / Edinburgh Zoo news, "Three rescued lynx settle into new home at Highland Wildlife Park", edinburghzoo.org.uk/news/three-rescued-lynx-settle-new-home-highland-wildlife-park, posted 16 May 2025; the lynx were abandoned in the Cairngorms and captured in January 2025, and the naming draw ran at crowdfunder.co.uk/p/name-a-lynx. The winner named one lynx Caledonia. Confirms the draw is 2025.
• Pygmy hippo (Haggis) draw, dating and £5 entry: RZSS Edinburgh Zoo news, "Moo Deng who? Edinburgh Zoo welcomes Haggis the endangered pygmy hippo calf", edinburghzoo.org.uk, with Haggis born 30 October 2024; Edinburgh Zoo on X announcing the draw, 4 November 2024. Confirms the draw is November 2024 and entries from £5.
• Cheetah draw, dating: Si's reading of the live Crowdfunder campaign page, noted as August 2024. No independent press located; treated as our observation, not an independently sourced date.
• Polar bear (Brodie) naming draw, excluded from the total: Civil Society News, "Name a polar bear fundraising prize draw reaches nearly £25,000 in a week", civilsociety.co.uk, dated 11 March 2022, reporting £24,185 from over 1,500 supporters at £5 entry, closing 17 March 2022. RZSS / Highland Wildlife Park news, "UK's youngest polar bear is named and takes first steps outside", highlandwildlifepark.org.uk, posted 25 March 2022, reporting the 2 week draw raised over £70,000 for Scotland's Wildlife Discovery Centre and that winner Brian Whitehead named the cub Brodie. We could not read the Crowdfunder page (crowdfunder.co.uk/p/name-our-cub) final total directly; it returned HTTP 403.
• RZSS social following over 400,000: The Prize Draw Company's records, as used in the Night at the Zoo case.
• Scottish Charity Register (OSCR), Royal Zoological Society of Scotland, charity number SC004064, oscr.org.uk. Source for charity registration. Reliability High.
• Crowdfunder UK Help Centre, "Prize Draws", help.crowdfunder.co.uk. Source for the platform's prize draw product and the role of the free entry route.