SAVE the Children Ayr has been commended for its incredible fundraising throughout 2018.

The Fundraising in Excellence Award was presented to the team at the Ayr and District branch after their extremely successful year raising money for the cause.

After securing the positions as one of the top fundraisers throughout the whole of the UK, chair of the committee Susan Searle explained how they won the award and how happy they were to receive such recognition.

She said: “On behalf of myself and the committee we are absolutely thrilled to get this award.

“We started off the year having our annual lunch at Turnberry with leading Scottish presenter Hazel Irvine coming to speak to us.

“We had over 400 people come to the event with a variety of people including a substantial number of corporate tables.

“We had plenty of raffles with some of the prizes including the chance to win a holiday! We managed to raise £25,000 which is a huge amount and we were delighted of how successful it was.”

In addition to the success of the annual lunch, Susan and her team went on to organise a creative art exhibition which raised an incredible sum for the charity.

Susan continued: “The second event we ran was the month-long art exhibition event. It was held during the month of October at the Maclaurin Art Gallery at Rozelle where over 200 artists entered.

“These ranged from the top professionals to anyone who liked to paint, and an extremely high standard was on show.

“From the exhibition alone, we managed to raise in the excess of £30,000 which is absolutely brilliant.”

Talking on their plans and aims, Susan explained that it would be a hard task to follow on from this year but emphasises that the commitment is there.

She said: “We will be doing the same events next year in the hope to raise as much money as possible for the cause.

We will try to match last year but will be hard to top. We will try our best!