Tyrone fundraising secrets revealed

A TOP Tyrone GAA official has lifted the lid on the secrets behind the incredible fundraising in the county which has bucked the economic downturn.

Despite the financial doom and gloom, the county’s chief fundraising unit, Club Tyrone, accumulated a record £354,000 (€420,000) in 2011, bringing its total for the past three years to £1m or €1.2m.

That makes Tyrone the envy of all county boards, especially the likes of Mayo, Kildare and Waterford, who are amongst those struggling financially at the moment.

So what makes Tyrone different?

Club Tyrone’s Mark Conway believes that the core of their strength is the message they are imparting.

“I think Tyrone works and thrives because it sticks true to our GAA values, that you put in, you don’t take out.

“This whole thing is about ‘we’ not ‘me’. You’re involved in it because you want to be involved in it and because you think it’s doing good for your community and wider society. That’s our selling point. Even for our Garvaghey project that all our Club Tyrone people and Garvaghey patrons are digging very, very deep into their own pockets to fund, that whole thing is sold on the whole concept of legacy.

“The GAA that we have in Tyrone has been gifted to us by the people that went before us. We have benefited from their work. There is an obligation on us to leave a legacy behind us for the next generations and Garvaghey is part of that legacy. And people buy into that with significant amounts of personal money to make that happen. It’s very simple.”

According to Conway, the key is not what members get from their membership such as jackets or free admission, but delivering the message on where that money is going. The £6.7m (€8m) centre at Garvaghey is Tyrone’s pride and joy because it is not designed purely for county teams. Both sexes and all codes, from hurling to Scór are being catered for, with the culture and heritage of the GAA emphasised as much as the games.

“The only thing we promise our people is an intangible and very priceless thing called ‘feelgood’. The GAA in Tyrone is doing phenomenal good for the wider society of Tyrone and has been doing it for over 100 years. It delivers on all sorts of levels.

He continued: “It delivers in terms of county teams but that’s only part of it. It delivers in terms of Scór, community development, gender equality. We then go and lay that in front of people and say ‘will you help us take that further forward?’ People say ‘yes, we will’. It’s no more complicated than that.

“We in the GAA fall into the trap of thinking that because we know something, therefore everybody must know it. “But of course they don’t. They’ll know it if we tell them. That’s something in the GAA we have not been good at.

“At the top level, there seems to be a growing belief that the only bit of the GAA that matters is round about the All-Ireland quarter-final stage. Certainly a very important bit of the GAA is getting to Croke Park in September (but) there’s 364 other days of the year as well that the GAA should be driving at all sorts of levels and with all sorts of people. That’s what Garvaghey’s about.

That’s what Tyrone GAA is about.”