Summary / objectives

Do It In A Dress is One Girl’s flag ship fundraiser where participants are encouraged to put on a school dress and take on a physical challenge to raise enough money to pay for one girl's education for a year in Uganda or Sierra Leone. 

Background

One Girl is a nonprofit organisation in Australia dedicated to making education available to all girls on the planet. One Girl’s focus right now is to educate one million girls in Africa by 2020, beginning with Sierra Leone. October is the month of One Girl’s signature fundraising project: Do It in a Dress, encouraging teams of fundraisers across the globe to wear a school uniform dress from Sierra Leone to raise awareness and money.

One Girl was started when the founder, Chantelle Baxter, saw a girl called Brenda begging on the street for $40 to be able to go to school. She had been kicked, spat on and attacked simply for her ambition to be educated.

One Girl believe that every girl has the right to an education and that being born a girl should not be a barrier to this. Uganda and Sierra Leone are two of the most difficult places in the world to be born a girl. A girl in Sierra Leone is more like to be sexually assaulted than she is to finish school. 

Do it in a Dress was created as a fundraiser that promotes the idea that you can do anything in a school dress – whether it is getting an education or taking on a challenge such as running a marathon. There is a beautiful synergy between the challenge and what the money raised will achieve.

The way it works: Do It in a Dress teams receive dresses from the One Girl organisation. These dresses are the uniform girls in Sierra Leone wear to school each day. The dresses have patches on them identifying the project. Team members wear the dresses to raise awareness and funds to put girls in school in Sierra Leone. The cost to put one girl through one year of school is $300.

Results

AU $719,393 raised so far in 2016.

Special characteristics

It is the only event of its kind where participants are encouraged to wear a school dress and take on any challenge of their choice. The fundraising target is AU $300, which is  tangible as it’s the cost of educating a girl for a year. 

Participants can sign up as individuals or as members of a team and compete against each other in leader boards. Participants are given their own online fundraising page and are encouraged to use #doitinadress to share their exploits on social media.

Influence / impact

As a result of 2016’s fundraising so far 2,397 girls will be getting an education. 

Since it began in 2011, the campaign has seen over 2,500 participants from all over the world raise well over AU $1 million for One Girl’s education projects.

Other relevant information

This case study was presented at I Wish I'd Thought Of That (IWITOT) London 2016 by Lizzi Hollis who was one of the audition winners for I Want To Talk At That and mentored by SOFII founder Ken Burnett.