This is 48 fundraising ideas to get your brain going on a whole bunch of different topics.
Good luck! We're gonna go through this quickly.
This is 48 fundraising ideas to get your mind thinking on how to raise money for your organization.
Don't worry, there's also a link to a bunch of extra resources you can find
that go along with this video but we're gonna go pretty quick so maybe put it in slow motion?
Starting off with athletic ideas: golf for good tournaments.
So get the companies involved, have people come out to the course.
Next up running for a cause. I love this!
5ks, marathons, there's easy ways of organizing this: start small
so you can build a base together...same thing for bike for a cause, you know.
5 mile loop, map it out, get people year over year involved, you're challenging them.
Lawn sport Olympics! This is just a funny way of getting a bunch of people
maybe sponsor teams to take part winner-take-all championship and like a
cornhole game or bocce what-have-you. Relays and challenges are fantastic.
Look, you do walk-a-thons, dance-a-thons, pledge per mile if you're walking around
a track and definitely again engaging that community, building a list of people
that you can then go back out to again the next year so you're really hopefully
getting local champions involved. Any sort of challenges that you're doing you
can always add a little extra so let's say if one team wins you can "embarrass
the boss" or principal with like a dunk tank, or tape them to the wall, or you can
have donate to vote for the type of "punishment" -- colorfully -- that you're giving
the person, or boss, or leader. You can do any sort of cause marketing with
these campaigns with a company pulling in the campaign aligning with their
cause and passion. You can partner with a local restaurant and do sort of pay for
water donation or a percent tip on top of tip for a local cause they care about:
works particularly well, I'd say, with local causes aligned with that.
Okay, next topic, drives. These are things where we're raising in a
cluster, in a group. Workplace giving is a big one, where you're in the workplace
you can work with charities.org to do this in order to get part of
people's donations out of their paychecks to be given to you and agree
to a drive. You can do a penny drive -- classic -- toss in a penny, collect a lot of
them then you have a lot of money. Box tops for good! General Mills actually
donates based on the number of box tops raised so this is particularly good for
public-leaning schools who are doing this. You can do a shoe drive! And use funds2orgs.com
in order to turn those shoes into dollars -- same thing with e-waste!
Ink cartridges and old cell phones. There's ways of also finding sites where
once you've collected a bunch you can then go about turning that into a donation to your organization.
Next, events! And this is a giant one. This is classically what we think of
you know, what we jokingly call the classic rubber chicken, right? You're giving out
speakers and awards and performances and getting people in there and sponsoring it, sure.
Other fun things to think about are like
poker or casino night events. So these are pieces where you can come in, obviously
not for winner-take-all money but you can have other awards. You can have a young
professionals bar event or a Sunday Funday where it's an excuse to get
dressed up and drink mimosas. Wine taste test fundraising, so a "guess the wine"
challenge and you can do any sort of things: okay the challenge and seeing who
can tell their Pinots from Pinotages. Be the bartender events --
sell the chance to be a bartender! You wouldn't believe how people would love
to be behind the bar. Shout out to Sue Bilotta and the team Fox group that does that --
Tips for Parkinson's is amazing, if you haven't ever heard of them go and
check them out. Trivia events -- a bar or event space, charge per team, create a fun
reward system, get your local bar involved, boom. Food tasting event -- so sell
tickets include voting challenges to spice it up, like a taste of the Lower East
Side type of thing, and local vendors kind of come in and it's a win-win
ideally for both the cause and the local companies. A dog show or cat show... come on
get everybody's cute cats and puppies together, march them down the avenue,
and see who's gonna support it. Art show by famous both internal or external artists
demonstrate art on the walls so, obviously, profits go for the cause.
Grow for good! So obviously mustaches we can grow in Movember but there's other
things you can grow -- your hair out, or your nails out -- this is a weird one, but
there's something there potentially. Auctions: so you can do a "guess the
amount" of a seasonal relevant thing in a jug. So, put a bunch of candy corn in, or
put a bunch of jelly beans in, see how many people get closest, take money
for each one of those guesses, and boom, there you go. Silent auction, classic.
So you can do any sort of silent auction event
in conjunction with an event so people writing in there. 50/50 raffle: you buy a chance
to win the overall money, and half of it goes to the cause. So if I gave you a dollar
fifty cents to the cause, fifty cents to the inevitable winner. You buy tickets and then
you have these little chances to win and then you can put those in different
events. That works for a lower tier prize packages, if no single person can
necessarily afford to bid, you know, a thousand dollars, but they can buy a hundred
dollars of tickets, they can put those tickets in those things. Live auction,
catered dinners, or a bachelor/bachelorette: dates, cars, all those things
can be auctioned. You can also do online auctions with high value celebrity experiences.
Charity.ebay.com or Charitybuzz are fantastic at managing all of those pieces,
we love those guys. A duck or a floaty thing race, so, pick a small body
of water, label all the ducks -- so I have duck number 101 --
dump it in with a thousand ducks, see which duck wins in the end, and obviously money
goes to charity. Karaoke night: book the venue, and then charge for songs or
spotlight moments, obviously for drinks, and partner in with that -- people love
their karaoke. Polar Bear Plunge into a cold body of water! Sell tickets.
Sell sponsorship. Write on people, bring towels, sponsor teams -- have fun with it!
Turn your Polar Bear Plunge into a cause. Cupcake or chili wars. Have judges.
Make the public judge, or charge tickets for votes for the best cupcake and
see who wins. Have a dog or car wash -- maybe not at the same time.
Online. All right more ideas when you go online. You can actually have supporters use tools
like goodsearch.org, and they send a portion of proceeds to your organization:
these are very very small margins. Same thing with the affiliate
advertising and the Amazon Smile program. Register your organization with Amazon
and then when people shop, you get a very small percent of their action to your cause.
Online sponsored real estate: a page, like, so that "million dollar website",
you can have people pay for messages on your site,
sort of a donor wall. You can have a sponsored brick or wall, and real estate
in your physical location, sell that online, saying, "Hey, we're making our new office,
sponsor a brick or stamp on our site." Grocery or gift wrapping at a
local store for open donations, right? You're sitting there, "Hey, would you mind if I
gift wrap your eggs for a cause?" Probably works better with presents.
You can do the Combined Federal Campaign for large nonprofits to get into federal
donation systems: check out charities.org for that. You can do peer-to-peer fundraising.
So you can source a recipe book with a theme, and sell the sponsorship, and sell,
then, the book. So all the people that also did it as well. You can do odd sort of
challenges with a fundraiser, peer-to-peer. If X dollars is raised,
someone will volunteer to do something odd and post it. You can do a birthday,
a wedding, or a shower gift for good. There's tons of sites that allow people to ask,
instead of gifts, send donations to a certain organization. We can do a
haunted house or a trick-or-treat give, so the Unicef style of giving people boxes to
run around and fundraise on your behalf during those events -- that correspond
obviously with the holiday, cuz Halloween in December doesn't make much sense.
You can sell a thing! So, branded food model. Certainly the Girl Scout model works
very well, getting those cookies out there and sold. Coffee, bake sale, coffee
and bake sale on high traffic days around, for example, the election is very
very common. You can sell branded materials: so obviously you can put your
logo on just about anything. I mean, heck, you could do pet rocks for the environment.
Why not? Be creative! You can do a cause- or a town-opoly: customize a Monopoly set,
or any sort of game, and then compare that with a game night fundraiser.
All right, whoo! 48 ideas. Hope something rang a bell.
Again, check out our resources on our site, where you can find some more links.
Hopefully that was helpful!