Through events, social media activity and our magazine, Better Lives, we’ve worked hard to make sure freemasons and their families know where to turn for help. This year, our enquiries team received 9,380 calls and emails from masonic families – an eighty-five per cent increase on the year before. We hope that this is a sign that our message is reaching the people who need us.
2016 - 2017
2017 - 2018
“I don’t know why I felt compelled to work in the charity sector – in all honesty, when I was starting my A Levels, I wanted to be a doctor! I studied International Relations at the University of Exeter to broaden my horizons a little, and started to see all these issues that were…
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“The MCF Community Awards provided a unique opportunity for us to devise a new way to engage directly with our supporters by giving them a real say in where to distribute grants to charities supporting their local communities. As a grant-maker we sometimes…
Read morePerhaps our greatest achievement of the year was during the summer, when our Community Awards gave us the opportunity to involve the public in our grant-making for the first time ever. As freemasons celebrated the 300th anniversary of the first Grand Lodge, we held a public vote to decide how to spend a one-off £3 million fund.
Freemasons across England and Wales selected 300 local charities to receive a special award from the fund, but the decision on the size of the grant – ranging from £4,000 to £25,000 – was decided by the online public vote.
We sent each of the 300 charities a pack of resources to ‘promote the vote’, and over a period of six weeks we were incredibly impressed by the enthusiasm and creativity of the charities and their volunteers, beneficiaries and patrons. When the vote closed, we were astounded that over 177,000 people had taken the time to place a vote.
In the months that followed, freemasons visited each of the 300 charities to celebrate the Community Awards and learn about the difference masonic funding will make to their work. Although the masonic community has been supporting local causes for centuries, this was the first time that members of wider society had been given a say in how freemasons make a difference to local communities. We hope that the MCF Community Awards have helped to build greater understanding of the charitable nature of freemasonry.
votes were cast in total, 90% of which were online
of voters were members of the public
voters wanted to learn more about freemasonry
votes were cast each day
people visited the website
the total audience reached of the #MCFawards
of charities used props & images
increase in e-news subscription
people reached through 15 radio broadcasts
views on MCF facebook posts
views on MCF twitter posts
new social media followers
