Earlier this year, Daria Chervona, a photo retoucher from Kyiv, was busy trying to raise 78 million Ukrainian national coins, about $2 million, for Ukraine’s military, posting daily on social media to urge friends and acquaintances to enter. This was a high bar, but after a few weeks she announced that she had cleared it, reaching her goal.
“You did it,” she told her Instagram followers in late January, in a post displaying the eight-figure sum she raised in large black letters.
Ms. Chervona attributes her success to a system she adopted last summer: dividing the work among dozens of people, each raising money from friends, a process she said can yield large sums. Each fundraiser is then highlighted in a social media post with their photo, tapping into civilians’ desire to be recognized as active participants in the war effort.
“They need to be able to say to themselves, ‘I’m doing something, I’m helping,'” Ms. Chervona, 28, said in a recent interview. “I just realized that any reasonably active person on Instagram could earn 50 thousand,” she added, referring to 50,000 Ukrainian national currency, about $1,300.
Since the first days of the war, thousands of volunteers have led crowdfunding efforts critical to supplying the Ukrainian military with critical equipment. They have become part of Ukraine’s social fabric, with nearly 80 percent of the population now donating, according to a recent survey.
But as the conflict drags on and the dynamic on the battlefield shifts to Russia, the men say it has become harder to raise money. This has prompted people like Ms. Chervona to borrow heavily from sales and marketing techniques to keep the donations flowing. They have organized auctions, organized sweepstakes and invited influencers to participate in promotional clips.
While the sophisticated weaponry donated by the West gets the attention, items raised through Ukrainian funding – such as warm clothing, bulletproof vests and drones – are things soldiers need and help boost morale.
The most ambitious crowdfunding campaigns have raised enough money to buy not only small items like gloves but also heavy equipment on the battlefield. Ms. Cervona’s last venture, for example, was dedicated to securing money to give the military brigade to buy five armored personnel carriers. The Ukrainian government said in September that crowdfunding accounted for 3% of Ukraine’s total military spending since the start of the war.
The key, said Oleg Gorokhovskyi, the co-founder of Monobank, Ukraine’s largest online bank, is to adopt techniques that have worked in other sectors. “You should do it like a business,” he said, adding that his bank has processed nearly $1 billion in donations since the start of the war.
He and Ms. Chervona provided copies of financial documents to The New York Times that they said showed the fundraising totals.
People have embraced the broader approaches they use, which Ukrainians call “group fundraising,” for its potential to scale operations and reach untapped donors. In December alone, nearly $115 million was donated through campaigns using this system, according to Monobank data — about as much as Germany’s latest short-term military aid package to Ukraine.
Ukrainian crowdfunding for the military dates back to 2014, when civilians began raising money to help a soldier fight Russian proxies who had fueled a separatist insurgency in eastern Ukraine.
But it took off dramatically after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 and has since become “by far the most popular way to engage in civil resistance” among Ukrainian civilians, said Kateryna Zarebo, a Kiev-based New contributor. Center of Europe.
Today, any Ukrainian with a social media account encounters daily calls to help buy a pickup, walkie-talkies of some other need for a brigade fighting on the front lines. Unit commanders sometimes reach out directly to their followers, urging them to help them purchase new attack drones.
“You’re scrolling through your news feed and you see your friends raising money and you think, ‘OK, I’m going to donate.’ Ok, I’ll donate a second time. Well, I can donate for the third time,” said Illia Pavlovych, a 28-year-old designer.
Simply tapping into Ukrainian spirit and patriotism — and anger at President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — worked at the start of the war because of the wave of solidarity that swept the country. But as the fighting continued, fatigue set in and people’s ability to donate decreased.
“I was trying to raise money using the classic methods,” said Valeriy Tkalich, a product manager who recently organized a crowdfunding effort to buy a jeep for the military. “And it was giving me less and less results.”
Trying to get around the issue, the organizers got creative: a famous Ukrainian performer covered the song “Just the Two of Us”, changing the chorus to “Just Drop the Donation”. A former member of the Kyiv city council opened a raffle, with his Porsche as the top prize.
But perhaps no initiative has been as successful as the one that creates a ladder of giving from friends and acquaintances.
Ms. Chervona, who is leading fundraising efforts while pursuing a job as a retoucher, said she and some friends decided to test the system in search of a way to expand the donor base so they could continue to raise large sums through smaller donations. .
Last July, she posted on Instagram saying she wanted to gather a group of 100 people with the mission of raising about $1,300 among her friends to buy drones for the 12th Azov Special Forces Brigade, a unit belonging to the Ukrainian National . Guard and has a nationalist legacy — targeting a total of $130,000.
The team members were called “the back people of Azov”, their photos were posted on social media and they were promised a voucher that looked like a military plate after the crowdfunding was completed.
Within a month, the operation far exceeded its goal, raising a total of $860,000, Ms. Cervona said.
“So effective,” Mr. Tkalich, who participated in Ms. Chervona’s crowdfunding, said of the method. “I wondered why we hadn’t done it sooner.”
Mr. Tkalich said the process mimics the marketing techniques he uses in his work in the gaming industry: “virality” that prompts participants to sign up others. the “social approval” that people seek when they buy popular products. the desire to imitate your friends.
Soon, many crowdfunding campaigns applying the same techniques appeared in Ukraine. Monobank figures show individual donations more than doubled between July and December 2023.
By highlighting participants on social media, crowdfunding businesses have played to a growing sentiment in Ukraine: a desire to be recognized as active players in the war effort, amid calls for greater civil society involvement.
“Donating is now social etiquette,” Ms. Zarebo said. “It’s about promoting one’s reputation.”
Ms. Chervona has created stickers with pictures of participants, tagging them as contributors, along with a QR code that can be scanned to make a donation. On a recent afternoon, several stickers were found in a trendy neighborhood of central Kyiv, plastered over coffee shops. Participants sometimes post photos of their stickers on social media.
He said many Ukrainians are now asking themselves, “After two years of war, am I still a volunteer?”
Mr Tkalich, who has launched dozens of crowdfunding campaigns since the start of the war, said the donations “act as little lifelines” to deal with the guilt of not fighting in the military.
“Although I am not involved in direct fighting, I am involved in these other meaningful actions,” he said in a recent interview, wearing around his neck the symbol he had received from Ms. Chervona. “Either you fight in the war, or you help end the war.
