Hello! We’re TechSoc and for Challenge Week 2026 we’re raising £1,600 to upgrade our lighting equipment to LED, allowing us to

support more student productions across campus and continue to become more sustainable!

Our Story

TechSoc was founded in 2017 and provides experience and training opportunities to any student who wants to learn more about technical theatre. Last year we worked with almost 30 student groups, helping to bring productions, showcases and performances to life across campus. Your donation will allow us to continue to work with all of these groups and continue to be well known throughout the university. 

We are going to be taking on a range of group and individual challenges for challenge week 2026, fundraising for some new lighting equipment to allow us to support even more student groups across campus!

Changes to university funding structures this year have left a shortfall in our equipment budget. Your donations will help support our continued existence as a society and our additional running costs as we continue to grow in numbers.

We would really appreciate any donation you can give to support the continued growth of our society! 

Where will the money go?

We will be putting the money towards some new LED lighting parts. We are hoping to upgrade some of our lighting stock so we can work on more productions at once while reducing energy consumption.

If we raise £1,600 we will be using this money to change some of our lighting stock to LED. This is supporting one of our goals to be more sustainable as we continue to grow. 

If we raise less than this amount we will look at upgrading fewer of our lights and finding alternative funding opportunities later in the year.

Alternatively if you help us to go above and beyond our target we will be looking at funding the purchase of some new moving lights! This is something we have been wanting to add to our stock for the past year but have been so far unable to source the funding to do so, but with your support this could be something we can bring to life! 

Why is this so important?

This money is helping to fill a clear gap in our stock, where we now are being asked to work on more shows than we have the equipment to cover. With our recent growth as a society we now have enough members to support simultaneous events but unfortunately not enough equipment to meet this demand. Your donation will ensure no production is limited by lack of equipment.

This will benefit our members greatly, allowing more students to experience the excitement of bringing a show to life, learning about technical theatre as well as holding management roles, working as a project manager and boosting our members’ confidence. Simultaneously benefitting more students from other societies as we are able to continue to support them on their events and form strong bonds between members of societies when working together to realise a creative vision!

We all love what we do in the society and being part of the backstage community.  Raising this extra money is so important to TechSoc to support running costs as things continue to get more expensive, as well as maintaining and keeping up to date with the changing technologies of the industry many of our members go on to work in.

The Challenges!

Below are some of the challenges we will complete as part of the week:

• A “role swap” with Dance Society - swapping with each other so we will learn and perform the dances for a day and they will operate the tech!
• A competitive sports day with YSTV, URY and DanceSoc. As the new group of societies being invited into Challenge Week this year, we are pitting ourselves against each other in a day of mixed sports
• One of our members, Kit, is taking on a 9 hour swim where she will be aiming to complete this challenge in the York Sport pool over an entire day!
• We will be hosting a draw Central Hall challenge, where our members are invited to work together to draw part of Central Hall - the venue in which we spend a significant amount of our time - to then be displayed as a full piece.
• We will be taking on a lighting programming challenge, working in pairs with one person blindfolded trying to program a lighting state as quickly as possible
• We are working with ShakeSoc and Chinese Society on their productions this week, so the teams on these events will be taking on a range of challenges including a costume competition, TechSoc bingo and more!
• Throughout the week we will be having a society wide game of ‘Mafia’ which you can follow along for daily updates on our Instagram! See which of our members will survive until the end of Challenge Week!
• We are also starting a pass it on cartwheel challenge so look out for these being posted on Instagram and we look forward to seeing your attempts!

Find us here

You can find us across the internet with our main social media posts being found on Instagram, but we are also on Facebook and TikTok. Similarly our website can be found at https://techsoc.co.uk/.  

We will primarily be posting about challenge week on our Instagram and we would love to have you following along our progress throughout the week! 

Instagram: www.instagram.com/uoytechsoc 

Facebook: University of York Technical Theatre Society - TechSoc 

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@uoytechsoc 

Help us succeed!

We would love you to donate as much or as little as you are able and any donations are hugely appreciated. Your donation could also help us unlock fundraising challenges which will help us reach our goal even faster (you can see these on the challenges page). 

If you are looking to support an individual or specific challenge please put a message with your donation saying who! 

Alternatively, if you are unable to donate then please do spread the word by signing up as a Challenge Week ambassador for our club, and sharing our social media posts to your own socials so as many people as possible can read about our efforts!