ENG“How about I raise a million and buy a tank?” Dasha Chervona on creative fundraising in wartime

Dasha Chervona is a volunteer and fundraiser. She is the co-founder of the “Azov Rear-Guard” campaign, which helped many other volunteers meet their fundraising goals – and inaugurated a new type of campaign. The Village Ukraine editor Iryna Vyhovska talked to Dasha about fundraising, good and bad decisions, trashy thoughts, and putting her life on hold.

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– Tell me about your life before the full-scale war. What did you do?

– I guess that’s what you’ve done.

– That’s exactly what happened. I wish the circumstances were different, but it’s true, you can say that I got what I wanted. Before the war, I took courses on strategy and PR, and organized shoots for a Ukrainian womenswear brand. I wasn’t thinking about being useful to my country.

Dasha from back then – preoccupied with figuring out what career path to take – was a totally different person. I can’t imagine now that my work will at any point not be related to what’s happening in our country, even after our victory. I might try a hand at producing other social projects, but either way I want to do something with a social purpose. Volunteering is helping me develop the skills I wanted to focus on.

– When did you first start thinking about it and what was your path to volunteering?

– I didn’t know how I could be useful. On the second day [of the full-scale war], I went to Shepetivka. I lived there for three weeks, I helped make camouflage nets, but I still didn’t feel like I was doing something truly useful.

I came back to Kyiv where for a while I helped friends who had a café where they cooked for hospitals and the military. I packed food, but I still didn’t feel like I was making a real contribution. I started becoming more active on social media: I shared fundraising campaigns and helped match volunteers and people who needed help. Very soon I realized that reposts alone don’t do much, so I was trying to be creative when I shared fundraisers. I called it “military SMM” [social media marketing]: I’d try to leave a personal mark on every post I was sharing.

This took a lot of my time. It was difficult – I’d never worked as a copywriter. It would take me four hours to write descriptions for four reposts. But I realized that was my goal: to share information and to draw attention [to Russian crimes and to fundraising campaigns and initiatives]. That helped me develop my copywriting skills and stay aware of what was happening. A friend of mine, an Azov Regiment veteran who was in rehabilitation at the time, took notice of what I was doing on Instagram and asked if I could help their new foundation [Support Azov – ed.] to gain recognition. I thought: I live in central Kyiv, I have lots of friends who work in the creative industry – managers, copywriters, designers. So I took on that task. I met the team behind the foundation and found a PR agency that would work with them.

On the one hand, I felt a sense of total freedom, I thought we would easily do what we set out to do, but on the other I felt ashamed of having spent the previous eight years without thinking about what was happening in my country.

Being an engaged citizen under the current circumstances is all about respect for the military, for the people who are unfortunately no longer with us, and respect for others who have lost their loved ones. I couldn’t stop, because I was never not aware of what was going on. This sense of engagement was a powerful motivator. I would make myself engage with terrible, shocking news from Mariupol, news about torture that came out after the liberation of [Kyiv, Kharkiv and Kherson oblasts].

It was so hard. I started losing hair: stress caused by the events at Azovstal triggered diffuse alopecia. I was suffering from chronic stress, but I wasn’t going to stay away from that content: those are my people, my land. [Dasha starts crying]

I was constantly pumping myself with all this negative information, and that’s what kept me going. I have no right to stop. You know the feeling when you can’t work until your workspace is neat and tidy? You want to straighten it up, and can only start working when it’s tidy. That’s how I felt about Ukraine. I can’t go back to my old lifestyle. Every month I try to go to a bar but all I want to do is hide in a corner. My whole life is suspended: I want to straighten up my workspace first – then I’ll breathe out and start living my life fully.

Azov Regiment and the Azov Rear-Guard campaign

– Why did you choose to help Azov?

– The first person who gave me an opportunity to put my crazy motivation to use was an Azov veteran who was at the time in the newly formed Special Operations Forces Azov Kyiv unit [now the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade - ed.]. Then I made friends in the National Guard’s Azov Brigade, and I decided to help them. 

That’s how I launched my first Azov fundraiser and met Marichka – we worked on the Rear-Guard fundraiser together, we have great synergy. I thought it would be fair to support the Azov One foundation [Azov One is a single unified fundraising platform for Azov brigade] after the Support Azov fundraiser.

– Tell me about your first fundraising campaign. What have you learned from it?

– My first fundraiser was an accident. I was volunteering, I wasn’t even thinking about starting my own fundraisers, my job was to manage and find people. Someone in the [volunteering] hub told me about the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade – it was fighting in Bakhmut at the time. I learned about what was happening there. I said, on a whim: “How about I raise a million and buy a tank?” I was told that I wouldn’t be able to buy a tank with a million – or at all – but heaters and armored vests were badly needed. I called the fundraiser “For Heat and Armor”.

The word “Azov” was banned on Instagram at the time; lots of posts were being banned because they mentioned “Azov”. It made sense that I would organize the fundraiser using my personal account. I was the ambassador of the foundation, but we had to fundraise without mentioning its name. My work earned me a loyal audience. When I started my first campaign, we raised the money within 24 hours. That was record speed.

– How much did you raise? How did you decide how much to raise?

– I’m not very well-versed in this: I think 200,000 is a lot, and a million is a lot, and 10 million is a lot – but it’s as if those are more or less equivalent. [Dasha laughs] I had no sense of how much effort it would take. I raised a million [hryvnias] in 24 hours. I still can’t explain how or why that happened, but that was very inspiring and I thought that if I have such a loyal audience, I should make use of it. The goal of my next fundraiser was 10 million [hryvnias].

– Were you ever afraid that your followers wouldn’t be able to raise that much? Or do you feel that if you need to raise 10 million, you just go and raise 10 million?

– I’m like wind, there’s a levity in everything I do, which has both advantages and drawbacks. I find it easy to forgive people and to calm people down, but sometimes this light-mindedness is an obstacle. I might let something slide where instead I should focus and take charge.

I settled on 10 million [hryvnias] because I liked the sound of it. I wanted to make a significant contribution to our forces in Bakhmut. I asked the hub: “What would 10 million buy?” and they said it could buy 10 personnel carriers and 10 pick-up vans that can be used for artillery. I thought that sounded great. [She laughs]

I thought it would be the same as my first fundraiser: boom, and done. Of course that’s not what happened. On the first day we raised a record amount, something around 1.2 million, but then the campaign stalled. That was when I realized I like setting goals that seem unachievable: it sets neurons in my brain in motion to find a way to do it. You start looking for solutions and paying attention to insights.

– What happened with that fundraiser?

– That’s when we came up with the “Bakhmut Calls, Kyiv Responds” initiative. It was an open call for the creative community and businesses to start their own fundraisers – similarly to the Azov Rear-Guard campaign. That initiative helped us raise another six million or so.

– Was that the beginning of the Azov Rear-Guard campaign?

– Not yet. There was another campaign to raise three million as part of the Fierce Fundraiser for Azov. That one was really hard-going. It was my first Azov One fundraiser, I didn’t have enough materials to post about it. I had some images and slogans, but that wasn’t enough.

We ended up meeting our fundraising goal on the day of the Nova Kakhovka tragedy. I was burning with a desire for revenge as I scrolled through the news about it, and I came up with this slogan: “We aren’t waiting for NATO’s reaction, we are waiting for Azov’s”. Within 24 hours, that post helped us raise the two million we were short.

– Often I see that people are better able to meet their fundraising goals when something terrible happens. We are often motivated by tragedy, perhaps because tragedy penetrates our psychological defenses. What else have you learned about fundraising during this time?

– I used to think that it’s difficult to motivate people to donate money if you’re relying on positive information alone. Before Azov Rear-Guard, I mostly drew on all sorts of horror to encourage people to donate. I wrote about those horrors because I couldn’t look away from them. I was frightened by those events, and I shared that fear with others; people who were equally frightened supported my fundraisers. Some people would write in comments that I was being manipulative, but it was just my way of reflecting on the events. I have a goal – to defeat the enemy with the fewest possible number of casualties on our side. I'm prepared to do whatever it takes to get there.

Azov One told me that wasn’t how they did things. They didn’t want to make people donate by eliciting negative feelings. I didn’t think that would work, but I had to look for new methods, to play by their rules. Within a couple of weeks, maybe a month, I came up with the Azov Rear-Guard idea. I saw one of my friends create a fundraiser to help raise 10,000 [hryvnias] to help a group of volunteers. I thought I could ask my friends to do something similar, but I knew I had to give them something in return. That idea kept simmering at the back of my mind.

– You said you came up with the idea in a couple of weeks or a month. How long does it usually take you to think through and plan each fundraiser?

– It doesn’t just happen in a few days. It takes me a couple of weeks to gather insights before I launch a fundraiser. Whatever I do – even when I’m just reading a book – I think whether there is something in it that that I could use in a campaign or its messaging.

After two or three weeks of doing that, a vision of the project starts to emerge. That’s what happened with Azov Rear-Guard. I thought that people should get something in return for doing their own fundraisers [as part of the overarching Azov Rear-Guard project]. I talked to friends with a lot of followers about why they hadn’t organized fundraisers and it turned out many of them felt unsure about how to create visuals and write accompanying text for something like that.

I knew straight away that I wanted each participant of this campaign to have an image and caption they could use. The idea with the visuals just materialized one day: I thought it should be something like an achievement badge in video games, something that would signal to other people: “Look, I’m a volunteer”. I thought it would feed people’s egos. Turns out this was what made that fundraising format viral.

– I think there were originally supposed to be 100 Azov Rear-Guards, but there were 500 in the end. How did that happen? Did you underestimate your potential and reach?

– We were going to ask our friends to share the information. We thought finding participants alone would take at least a month. I was so worried no one would want to take part that I wrote to my retouching students asking them to like my post. I thought we’d have 5-10 people joining the campaign in the early days. But an hour after we posted [about the fundraiser], we had hundreds of comments. It happened so fast. I felt euphoric. It was a powerful sense of unity.

Finding motivation today

– What motivates you now? You said that in the beginning of the full-scale war you would make yourself look at the [war’s] horrors to get enraged and find motivation in that. But now we know we have a long way ahead of us, we don’t know how long it’s gonna last, and the horrors that could motivate us in the beginning seem to be losing their motivating force. What motivates you now? What keeps you going even in the darkest of times?

– I know it’s a bit strange but I can only draw an analogy to having a dog. Dogs are the only living creatures I’ve had a chance to look after. For the first few weeks after I adopted a dog from a shelter I thought I’d take it back to the shelter. But I couldn’t, because I’d taken on the responsibility. I was asking everyone who had dogs about when I’d start feeling this unconditional love everyone talks about, because I felt nothing. I didn’t feel any sense of connection with it at all. And then someone told me that the more I care for the dog, the deeper my feelings towards it will grow. A month later, the dog contracted an illness. I started looking after it and the more time and energy I put into it, the more I cared for it, the more I loved it. I felt like it was really my dog, and I would never give it away.

The sacrifices I make – like putting my personal life and my career on hold for the sake of volunteering – make me feel so invested in it that it made me truly love my country. Now I can’t relax and just stop doing it. The more I invest in it, the more I love it, the more work I want to do for it. That’s how it is now.

– You mentioned taking a pause both professionally and in your personal life. Did you put your work on hold because volunteering was consuming all your time? You’ve recently posted about looking for work. When did you realize it was time to come back to that reality?

– I would sometimes take on projects just to pay for my day-to-day expenses. Those projects helped me pay rent and buy food for myself and my dog. Mostly they came from clients I knew for several years. Last summer, when I started working with the foundation, I had no money to pay rent for a few months. My dad helped me with rent. Mom would bring me food. I was in a state of absolute panic.

For about a year, I kept taking on commissions from my regular clients, but I was volunteering all the time, which has shifted my priorities. I could be somewhat irresponsible when it came to work projects. I think that made some clients lose their trust in me. I haven’t looked for new clients in a long time.

I had a month after the first Azov Rear-Guard fundraiser when I could only take on one project. We hardly slept, we were working into the early hours of the morning, but I managed to squeeze one [work] project in because I knew I had to pay rent.

I was completely burnt out after the first Azov Rear-Guard fundraiser. Partly because I was constantly stressed about money: I had to keep looking for sources of income, but I had absolutely no energy to talk to anyone. I realized I didn’t want to experience that again, being worried about the fundraiser, constantly generating ideas, and all the while worrying whether you’re able to pay rent and buy food. Before launching the second Azov Rear-Guard fundraiser I started looking for a job.

– Lately volunteers have been saying it’s become more difficult to meet each fundraiser’s goals – but there are also more fundraisers happening. Do you think people are donating less? How do you feel amid this fight for attention?

– It’s true, people are donating less, but there are also more fundraisers. A friend of mine for example told me he used to donate to a pool of people he trusted – now this pool is much bigger. Instead of giving each of them 100 hryvnias, he is giving 10 each but to a much larger number of fundraisers. Still, I’m glad he does it. Other people are just paralyzed into inaction by the large number of fundraisers. Or they had to stop donating – or to donate less – because they feel they’re not doing well financially.

That’s only happening because we have all gotten used [to the war], because we can breathe freely, we’re in Kyiv, where it’s relatively safe and there is no fighting. That’s why there’s no internal motivation to work harder, to donate more. I think this sense of getting used to the war costs us a lot of donations every day.

– Are there things we could all be doing to help encourage others to donate and to meet the fundraisers’ goals?

– Finding new ways to get people involved. I remember there was a guy who created comic strips, releasing new pages when he’d raise a certain amount. Doing creative things like that works. 

I think it’s important that volunteers who can’t do something creative instead create an immediate connection between the military and their audiences. For example, having soldiers record a video to show the conditions they’re fighting in.

Last year a video in which a soldier was using a spade to break up ice in his trench was all over social media. That video was an emotional trigger, plunging everyone back into reality.

Truth is, each of us has to foster their own personality, their own identity. I remember this phrase, which has become very important for me: Each person’s dignity and self-actualization are key to our sovereignty over a common future. People will only be motivated to donate and volunteer, and know why they’re doing it, if they understand the value of what we’re fighting for and what we have already lost.

Moral principles and integrity are the foundation of the right way to think about and approach fundraising campaigns. We can keep coming up with creative and interactive fundraisers, but they have to be undergirded by a sense of national consciousness.

– Working on values and national consciousness takes years. What can encourage people to volunteer here and now?

– Maybe social benefits. For example, Arsen Halieiev invited me to join My F**king Gym for free. He said helping me take care of my mental health is his contribution to volunteering. I was very moved by that. I never asked for anything: not money, not gratitude from military commanders. We are not paid to do this. Arsen’s offer was so nice. Recently he said he wanted to come up with something like a subscription for volunteers. It would be great if volunteers had discounts to go to movies or a gym. Benefits like this and a sense of a special status could encourage a more thoughtful approach.

– There’s also the matter of trying to tell a true volunteer apart from fake ones…

– That’s a whole other story. [She smiles]

Communication among fundraising campaigns

– Talking about other members of the Azov Rear-Guard, they’re all over Instagram. How does this affect other campaigns? Are  you in touch with the organizers of other fundraisers? Do you coordinate your start dates?

– No one has ever told me to my face that we were taking attention away from other campaigns. Volunteers are for the most part grateful to us for coming up with this pattern, because it’s worked for many other campaigns too. We’re not trying to monopolize this space. We ended up organizing the second campaign because so many people wanted to join the first one, we just couldn’t fit everyone in.

We knew there was enough momentum for another large-scale fundraiser, but it will be difficult to raise the same amount [100 million hryvnias, approximately US$2.8 million - ed.] again. We’re not Lachen [Ihor Lachenkov, a popular Ukrainian blogger and fundraiser - ed.] or the Serhii Prytula Foundation, we don’t have Ukraine-wide reach or recognition. We have to get a lot of people involved [to meet our fundraising goals] – so perhaps this does affect other fundraisers and the information field overall.

I’m not sure what to do about it – other than coming up with new approaches and creating distinct visuals for fundraisers – if you want people to join them. We don’t feel bad [about capturing so much public attention] because we’re just normal girls, we don’t have large numbers of followers or influencer friends. None of the people we invited to join the fundraiser were invited because they had a lot of followers. Eventually we had influencers reach out to us on their own initiative.

– So campaign organizers don’t really talk to one another? You don’t agree that someone will start their campaign on one day, and someone else will start on another day?

– That would be very difficult. There are more campaigns than there are days in a year.

– What are some of the campaigns that have struck you personally? Of course, an effective campaign is a campaign that’s met its target, but fundraising campaigns have also become part of our culture, they’ve changed and evolved. Are there any campaigns organized by other people and groups that you liked?

– I really liked Shields Ukraine’s Driving Force initiative, with women fundraising for tires for armored personnel carriers. I liked the idea of each woman having her picture taken, instead of everyone using the same design. It was such a beautiful campaign, including the fact that it was women raising money for tires. I really like when people use photos as part of their campaigns. That campaign’s overall messaging was great, too. In general though, all fundraisers follow a similar pattern: image, text, donations “jar”. [Ukrainian bank Monobank has an online feature where users can set up “jars” for others to contribute to; this is one of the most common fundraising tools in Ukraine now - ed.]

– What about Vasia Baidak and his songs?

– Of course. It’s great when people sing and make music videos. I loved the Autumn Hymn.

– By Nadia Dorofieieva?

– Yes. But I wouldn’t have been able to fundraise with songs. I’m into darker stuff. Azov Rear-Guard has created good momentum, but generally I’m not too keen on a more light-hearted approach. But that's just my own opinion, my feelings. People who write songs do it really well. These songs are becoming part of our culture.

I think at some point we’ll look back on our journey and put together a book – a book bigger than my head. It will talk about different creative campaigns, with QR-codes, for people from around the world to see how Ukrainians tackled fundraising.

– My last question is: what would you tell Ukrainians to encourage them to keep donating?

– Investing in ourselves means investing in our country. We can’t afford to relax and stop growing. I often think about the caption of Oleksandr Hrianyk’s photo; he was a soldier who was killed at the Azovstal Steelworks [in Mariupol]. I talked to him a lot while he was there. I learned a lot from those conversations. He wrote: “When we can’t undo a loss, it’s our duty to make sure it wasn’t in vain.” It’s really important to me to embody the values of the fallen heroes.

That’s why I’m doing everything I can not only to bring the return to normal life closer, but also in memory of everyone who is no longer with us. I think about the tears of the [fallen soldiers’] mothers every single day, and that makes me want to do even more.

And one last thing. Staying up-to-date with everything that’s going on is our duty. The duty of everyone who wants to contribute to Ukraine’s victory. Only someone who is fully aware of everything that’s going on can keep volunteering despite all else.