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Top tips for fundraising

By Guest
July 22, 2009 at 4:02 pm

Ever wanted to do a sponsored leg wax? Listen to fundraiser Chloe Day’s tips for organising fun and successful charity fundraising events.

Top tips for fundraising

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Mark: Hi. I am Mark South and this is Red Cross radio. If you’re interested in organising an event to raise money for charity, listen on to find out the Red Cross’ top tip for having a fun and successful time. Today I’m with Chloe Day who is going to share some of the money advice she’s built up over her years with the Red Cross.

Chloe, why should people get involved in fundraising?

Chloe: Organising a fundraising event is a great way to do something that you may not do every day of the week; something that’s fun and enjoyable and just gives you a bit of different experience to everyday life. At the same time you can learn new skills or reinforce skills you already have in terms of events planning.

It’s also a way that you can take action for something that you believe in, so fundraising for a charity like the Red Cross means that you can have an impact on a situation that you think needs changing. And there aren’t that many ways that you can involved in that kind of thing, so it’s quite a unique opportunity in that way.

Mark: And once someone’s decided they want to organise an event, what’s the first thing they need to do?

Chloe: The first thing you need to think about is which type of event that you actually want to run. These can be broken down into four different categories.

For instance, you might have a fundraising event in which people pay a donation in return for receiving something. That might be something like a cake sale or a car wash, where you’re obviously washing a car for them. It could be an idea that’s a little bit more complicated like running ‘switching’ party where people bring items of clothes, dvds or books that they don’t want anymore and pay to take part and they get to swap with the people.

It could be something where people a donation to take part in something. So that might be for instance a dress down day or for the Red Cross a dress in red day, at the workplace or at school. It could be to take part in a quiz or any kind of tournament. So that could be any sort of sporting tournament, or something like a remote control car competition or a video games competition, there’s load of options with that.

Another option is running an event in which people pay a donation to spectate. Something like a film night or a fashion show or a talent contest that you might want to run.

And of course there’s a whole range of sponsored events that you can run. Things like walks, to a sponsored knit-a-thon, a sponsored leg wax, a sky dive, so there’s a really wide range. The important things to bear in mind when you are trying to decide which event to run are firstly, what will suit the people you’re looking to involve in the event because there’s such a wide range of ideas, and different things suit different people. It’s really important that you pick something that you’ll enjoy running. If its something that you’d enjoy going to the likelihood is other people would like go too.

Mark: So when someone’s decided to do a sponsored leg wax or fashion show, what the next step?

Chloe: Once you’ve decided on your fantastic idea for fundraising the next thing to do is give yourself plenty of time to do planning and promoting the event. It’s quite a good idea to get together a group of people if you can so that you can share out the work load and you can define each person’s responsibilities so that you know who’s doing what when so that everything works and runs smoothly. It’s a good idea to put together a basic budget just so that you make sure that you’re going to be able to raise more money than you need to spend. It’s always helpful for fundraising.

Mark: And what’s the best way to make sure loads of people come along?

Chloe: Advertising your event is absolutely the key to its success. Obviously if nobody knows it’s happening then nobody is going to come and it won’t actually happen. Think about the most appropriate means for advertising your event for your audience. So if you are going to use posters, think about where are the best places to put them. Could you use email? Are the people that you’re going to want to come to your event using social networking sites? If so, which ones? If you’re fundraising in the workplace you could use intranet. If you’re looking to get people from your local community to come along that you don’t necessarily know, then you could put out a press release in the local newspaper.

Mark: What about any other things people can do to make sure that they raise as much money as possible?

Chloe: It’s always worth having a collection tin at the event or somebody standing with a bucket so that if people want to make an extra donation they’ve got the facility to do that. It’s a really simple thing you can do and it’s a way to raise a bit more money. Similarly you can also have really traditional fundraising ideas like guess the number of sweets in the jar. In 2010 there are loads of big sporting events that you can run sweepstakes for either in your workplace as a separate thing or as part of a bigger event. There’s the Winter Olympics, the Commonwealth Games, the Football World Cup as well as the FA Cup and Wimbledon which happen every year, so there’s lots of options there.”

Mark: You mentioned a lot of people choose to do something sponsored like a fun run or jumping out of a plane, is knocking on all your neighbour’s doors waving a sponsorship form in their faces still the best way to go about collecting money?

Chloe: A really useful tool now is online sponsorship forms. Although you can still get sponsorship in person using a paper form, there are websites that you can use like ‘Just Giving’ that you can use where people can make a donation online using a credit or debit card. That makes it really easy for you to send that out to a lot of people. It also means that it’s much easier to collect gift aid, which increases the amount that you raise if it been donated by a tax payer by up to 28 percent. If you go to www.justgiving.com/redcross it gives you a lot of information about the charity anyway so it helps you to write an informed description of what the money is going to go towards.

I recently took part in a sponsored sky dive for the Red Cross to raise money for Red Cross Appeal Week. There were 12 of us in our group that did the sky dive, we all set up Just Giving pages and most of us created groups Facebook so was really easy to get the links to the Just Giving pages out to all our friends and get them all sponsoring us. But as well as collecting sponsors we all ran a few small scale fundraising events in our office. Which included a cake sale one day, a sweepstake for the FA Cup and those things bumped up our joint sponsorship and helped us get towards our target, which we exceeded in the end and we actually raised over 5000 pounds for the Red Cross just through the 12 of us doing that jump.

Mark: Wow, that’s really good. And it just goes to show how simple fundraising can be, you just need to be willing to jump out of a plane. You can get even more tips and ideas for holding your own event on our website www.redcross.org.uk/getfundraising, including press releases, templates and lots and lots of ideas for how to raise money for the Red Cross. Thanks for listening to Red Cross radio. If you have any comments or suggestions just email us podcasts@redcross.org.uk

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 at 4:02 pm and is filed under Fundraising and events, Podcasts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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