How Edinburgh Zoo turned one art-trail giraffe into a £26,685 prize draw

Edinburgh Zoo ran two fundraisers off the same set of objects in 2022, and the more famous number is not the prize draw. The auction of its Giraffe About Town sculptures raised £246,000, as RZSS reported. Quietly, alongside it, the zoo made one of the trail giraffes, "Bamboozled", the grand prize of a £5 paid-entry prize draw. That draw raised £26,685 from 1,902 supporters, the final total as displayed on the Crowdfunder campaign page.

The interesting thing is not the size of either number. It is that one warm audience was harvested twice, at two completely different price points, off the same owned assets. The auction reached the few people who could bid £14,000 for a giraffe. The prize draw reached the 1,902 people who could not, but who would happily pay a fiver for a chance at a sculpture and a day feeding giraffes with the chief executive. An auction structurally excludes almost everyone who loves the zoo. A prize draw is how you let them in.

And the prize cost the charity almost nothing it did not already own. The sculpture was made for the trail and already paid for. The headline experience, feeding the animals and a behind-the-scenes host, is the zoo's own access, sold every day in other forms. This is the experience-prize model that the zoo's sibling case, the 2021 Night at the Zoo draw (£76,863, final total as displayed on its own Crowdfunder campaign page, and covered as a separate case), runs on too: when the institution owns the audience and owns the prize, the draw is close to pure margin.

At a glance

• Beneficiary: Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS), Scottish charity SC004064, operator of Edinburgh Zoo
• Campaign: Giraffe About Town, a free public art trail, summer 2022, created with Wild in Art
• The prize draw: "Win your own giraffe!" on Crowdfunder
• Mechanic: Paid-entry prize draw with a free entry route
• Entry price: £5 for one entry, with bundles at £15, £50, and higher tiers to £450 that added animal adoptions
• Grand prize: "Bamboozled", an 8ft trail giraffe sculpture by artist Jina Gelder, plus a CEO-hosted experience feeding giraffes and a giant panda, a night at Eden Locke and dinner at Bonnie & Wild
• Runner-up prizes: 5 "giraffe magic moments" feeding the herd with keepers
• Prize draw raise: £26,685 from 1,902 supporters, the final total as displayed on the Crowdfunder campaign page, closed 25 September 2022
• Separate auction raise: £246,000 from 38 sculptures, as reported by RZSS, auctioned 4 October 2022 at the National Museum of Scotland (top lot £14,000)
• What it funds: RZSS wildlife conservation in Scotland and globally

What the draw was

A paid-entry prize draw, run on Crowdfunder by Edinburgh Zoo for RZSS. Each £5 bought one entry, with bundles at £15 for four and £50 for fifteen, and higher tiers from £150 to £450 that folded in an animal adoption. A free entry route was offered. That route is the standard compliance mechanism for a UK charity prize draw: because anyone can enter without paying, it is not a lottery in law and needs no Gambling Commission licence. None of the coverage framed it as a "free-entry draw", and it should not be read as one. Paid £5 tickets were the primary route and the source of the money.

The format was one grand prize plus five runners-up. That is six winners in total, which gives the campaign more than one happy face to show and spreads the chance of winning something across the entrant base, while still keeping a single hero prize for the story.

The prize

The grand prize did three jobs in one package, and each part came from something the zoo already controlled.

• The object: "Bamboozled", an 8ft giraffe sculpture painted with panda artwork by artist Jina Gelder, was one of the trail sculptures. 36 of the 40 eight-foot giraffes were sold at the October auction, and Bamboozled was used as the prize in the draw. It was already made and paid for, so giving it away cost no new money.
• The experience: a VIP visit for the winner and a guest, hosted by RZSS chief executive David Field, with refreshments in the Mansion House and the chance to feed the giraffes and a giant panda. This is the zoo's own access. Its marginal cost is close to zero, and its perceived value is high precisely because it cannot be bought off the shelf.
• The trimmings: a night at the Eden Locke aparthotel on George Street and dinner at Bonnie & Wild in the St James Quarter. These rounded the prize into a full Edinburgh weekend. Whether they were donated by the venues or paid for by RZSS is not in the public record.

The point for a fundraiser is that the expensive-looking prize was assembled almost entirely from owned inventory and owned access. The giraffe was a sunk cost. The animal experience is the institution's to give. That is what makes the experience archetype work: the prize that pulls in £5 entries is something the institution already has, not something it has to go out and buy.

Audience

The audience was the zoo's own warm public: members, past visitors, families who had walked the trail over the summer, and the wider Edinburgh and Scotland affinity for the pandas and giraffes. The draw did not need to manufacture a relationship. It monetised one that the trail had just spent two months refreshing across the city.

This is the quiet logic of running the draw at all. The trail had put 40 giraffes on the streets of Edinburgh through July and August, free to everyone, building affection at scale. The auction could convert only the top of that affection, the handful willing to bid thousands. The £5 draw converted the broad middle: 1,902 supporters at an average of about £14 each. Those are two different audiences reached by two different price points off the same summer of goodwill.

Marketing

The draw rode the trail. Giraffe About Town was a free, citywide, photogenic art event running for two months, which is a marketing engine in its own right: press coverage, sponsor channels and constant social sharing of the sculptures. The prize draw sat on top of that attention as the "you can actually take one home" call to action. The single most shareable promise, win an 8ft giraffe and feed a panda with the zoo's boss, did the heavy lifting. No paid media spend is recorded in the public sources, and the reasonable reading is that the draw was promoted mainly through the zoo's own owned channels and the trail's existing momentum.

What charity teams should take from this

1. An auction and a low-ticket draw are not competitors, they are two harvests of one audience. An auction monetises the few who can pay thousands. It structurally excludes everyone else who loves your cause. A £5 prize draw monetises that excluded majority. Running both off the same campaign, as Edinburgh Zoo did, reaches high-value bidders and £5 supporters without either cannibalising the other, because they are aimed at different wallets. If you are planning an auction of owned inventory, ask what the £5 version is for the people who will never bid.

2. Build the prize from what you already own. The draw's pulling power was an 8ft sculpture the zoo had already made and an animal experience the zoo gives every day. Neither was bought in for the draw. For a visitor attraction, heritage site or membership body, the cheapest compelling prize is almost always a piece of owned inventory plus owned access: a behind-the-scenes experience, a named object, time with the people who run the place. That is the experience archetype, and it is what makes the draw close to pure margin.

3. Use a free, public, photogenic moment as the draw's shop window. The draw worked because it sat inside a two-month free art trail that was already generating attention, footfall and social sharing across a whole city. The trail was the marketing; the draw was the conversion. If you have a public moment that draws a crowd, a festival, an exhibition, an open day, a trail, that is the cheapest top of funnel a draw can have. The draw turns attention you were going to generate anyway into income.

What this case study does not claim

The £246,000 is the AUCTION total, not the prize draw. The paid-entry draw raised £26,685. The two are separate mechanics and must not be added or conflated; this case is about the draw, with the auction as context. The 2021 Night at the Zoo draw (£76,863) is an earlier, separate campaign covered as its own case; its total is no part of these figures either. The £26,685 and the 1,902-supporter count come only from the Crowdfunder page, read via a proxy because the page itself is bot-protected, and are not repeated in any press source, so they are treated here as the platform's self-reported gross total. The higher entry tiers bundled animal adoptions, so a small part of that total is adoption value rather than pure draw entry. Net to RZSS after Crowdfunder fees is not published. Whether the hotel and dinner elements of the prize were donated is not in the public record. The case presents the dual auction-plus-draw structure as a transferable model, not as proof that any single choice caused the result.

Sources

Verified 2026-06-11; publication pass 2026-06-12. A further search on 2026-06-12 found no press source repeating the £26,685 draw total, so it remains attributed solely to the Crowdfunder campaign page.

• RZSS, "Edinburgh Zoo raises £246,000 for wildlife conservation at Giraffe About Town auction", https://www.rzss.org.uk/news/edinburgh-zoo-raises-ps246000-wildlife-conservation-giraffe-about-town-auction (auction total, lots, top bid, quote)
• Edinburgh Zoo, same auction story, https://www.edinburghzoo.org.uk/news/edinburgh-zoo-raises-ps246000-wildlife-conservation-giraffe-about-town-auction (auction date, venue, auctioneer)
• RZSS, "Citywide Giraffe About Town art trail hits streets of Edinburgh", https://www.rzss.org.uk/news/citywide-giraffe-about-town-art-trail-hits-streets-edinburgh (trail dates, sculpture counts, partners, context)
• Edinburgh Zoo news, "Win your own eight-foot-tall giraffe, feed a giant panda and support wildlife conservation" (prize, experience, runners-up; article since redirected)
• Crowdfunder, "Win your own giraffe!", https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/win-your-own-giraffe (entry tiers, £26,685 raised, 1,902 supporters, funded 25 September 2022, free entry route; accessed via reader proxy)
• The Scotsman / Edinburgh News, "Edinburgh Zoo Giraffe About Town auction raises £246,000 for wildlife conservation", https://www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/news/environment/edinburgh-zoo-giraffe-about-town-auction-raises-ps246000-for-wildlife-conservation-3870555 (press corroboration of the auction total)
• Crowdfunder, "Win a once-in-a-lifetime night at Edinburgh Zoo!", https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/nightatthezoo (sibling 2021 Night at the Zoo draw total, £76,863, context only)
• Edinburgh Zoo, "Edinburgh Zoo after dark", https://www.edinburghzoo.org.uk/news/edinburgh-zoo-after-dark (corroborates the Night at the Zoo draw raising more than £76,000)
• OSCR Scottish Charity Register, RZSS SC004064, https://www.oscr.org.uk/about-charities/search-the-register/charity-details?number=SC004064 (legal status)

See factsheet.md for the claim-by-claim audit with confidence ratings.