Raised At Full Draw

Our vision at RAFD is to provide education about outdoor conservation and hunting. However, archery and bowhunting is our primary focus. Our non-profit aims at contributing significantly to help build better understanding of hunting’s role in conservation. Increase exposure to archery and bowhunting.

Overall, we would like to offer camps in every location where archery and bowhunter education is needed. This is challenging secondary to funding. Our expansion will be dependent on donations from individuals, groups, and the hunting industry. Our programs are run with volunteers. We are soliciting the help of more volunteers to help staff our camps, outreach projects and to help us achieve our targets.

A goal of our non-profit is to identify individuals (youth, women, families) who are interested in the outdoors, want to learn more about hunting and offer a positive support system to allow the success in learning about bowhunting to hopefully be able to do it on their own. The focus on the individuals may slightly differ at each level. At the youth level, we are providing as much hands on learning as possible rather than your traditional classroom style of learning. For our women programs, we want to ensure our program is relaxing, offer suggestions if they are bowhunting on their own (ground blind vs tree stand) and teaching more about the harvest and how to prepare your wild game. While our family camps will be a mixture of both to tailor to both youth and adults.

Our long term goal is to offer multiple camp programs where ever there is a need.
We would also like to expand our outreach programs by adding new venues and fulltime staff to accomplish this role.

Short term goal is to be able to expand to 3 to 4 camps a year or more depending on funding and volunteers. These could be youth, women or family camps.

Overall we want to help be apart of the recruitment, retention, reactivation and increase bowhunter numbers.

Our non-profit organization seeks to help foster a passion for outdoor conservation, hunting ethics, bowhunting and archery for youth, women and families. We are dedicated to helping empower and build leadership skills through our mentoring programs for our older participants.

Our expansion of camps will be dependent on donations from individuals, groups, and the hunting industry. Our programs are run with volunteers. We are soliciting the help of more volunteers to help staff our camps, outreach projects and to help us achieve our targets.

The RAFD camps will create partnerships with local Non-Government Organizations ie critter clubs such as Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Whitetails Unlimited and many more as well as partner with State Agencies (Department of Natural Resources or Fish and Wildlife).

With the partnership of the state agencies we will be providing the participants the Bowhunter Education certificate, we will in turn be helping the states to recruit additional hunters.

Our top 3 Keys to Success:
• Establish a strong network of support in each state camp is held with the local NGO’s/critter clubs and State Agency’s overseeing bowhunter education.
• Launch a series of fundraising activities that will successfully fund that states camp program and Nationally identify those who can finically support headquarters.
• Nationally establish an effective training program for volunteers that will be teaching bowhunter education to increase their ability to successfully communicate the same information to participants.

There are four focuses to RAFD’s camp program implementation:
• First is the creation of a camp host family and the location. Once identified provide them with the How to Host a Camp Guide.
• Second is the recruiting of participants and volunteers.
• Third is the training of volunteers.
• Fourth is the local development of camp fundraising strategies.

Fundraising Strategy:
Our fundraising marketing is focused on private/individual donations, state contracts, grants from private foundations and corporate industry donations. We still need to diversify our financial resources for headquarters/nationals. We also need a larger individual donor base to develop an annual giving campaign.
We are now associated with Amazon smile as a charity for individuals to make eligible purchases and a portion of their funds with be sent to our non-profit.

RAFD hired a full-time COO to oversee the day to day operations and to allows search for the donations that we will allow for the expansion.

The COO will also be seeking the host families to hold camp in the additional locations where camps are needed.
We are soliciting the help of more volunteers to help staff our camps, outreach projects and to help us achieve our targets.

Our marketing strategy will be to successfully sell the camps to our target market as well as state agency’s and others willing to volunteer to increase our new hunter numbers.
Our target market is youth 12-17, adult women and families in the United States.
The marketing plan is aimed at spreading the word about our mission and camps.
Currently, we are marketing the follow ways:
1. Our website www.raisedatfulldraw.com
2. Social media: Facebook and Instagram
3. State Agencies (Department of Natural Resources), hunting expos, archery shoots, State Bowhunter Associations, and “critter groups” such as Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Safari Club International and many others.
4. Our trailers being wrapped
5. Our Outreach Program
6. Raised Hunting TV Show with the help of the Holder Family
7. Local marketing via TV, Radio, word of mouth in the states where we have camps
8. Brochures
9. Grant Proposals

We would like to expand our marketing to other archery groups and clubs, 4-H archery groups, Schools, Schools with the National Archery in the Schools Program both in-school and competitive programs, Women in the Outdoors/Becoming an Outdoors Women and other industry related groups.

Brochures and grant proposals have been developed to sell the benefits of the program to both potential participants and donors.

A marketing effort will need to be implemented to attract and retain quality volunteers for the program.

Since RAFD started in 2014 we have:
• hired one full time staff
• have youth camps in Iowa, Montanta, North Dakota and Wisconsin
• in 2018 opened a women's camp in Iowa
• had additional youth camps in Kansas and Illinois
• certified hundreds of participants in bowhunter education
• purchased a truck to travel to camps
• purchased two trailers (camp trailer and outreach trailer)
• partnered with many different NGOs and State Agencies
• In the off camp season started an outreach program that allows us to recruit participants to attend camps.

We have a trailer that is outfitted with bows/accessories, arrows, bow repair equipment, individual teaching station supplies, extra camping supplies (tents, sleeping bags) and tools such as drills, post hole digger, shovel, extension cords etc. We take the camp trailer to each camp to be able to teach from.

Our non-profit organization seeks to help foster a passion for outdoor conservation, hunting ethics, bowhunting and archery for youth, women and families. We are dedicated to helping empower and build leadership skills through our mentoring programs for our older participants.

One of the most rewarding attributes of our camps is to be able to see the leadership, friendships, and personal growth that occurs. We have campers who have become volunteers because of the experience they had a camp. We have parents who come to us and say our camp changed their child’s life.