Purpose Driven Fundraising

For obvious reasons (I do claim to be the Fundraising Whisperer after all!) I am often asked about different ideas for fundraising. My first question is always: ‘Why are you raising money?’.

Wherever possible, I use the answer to bring focus to my fundraising ideas. The more creatively we can relate the ‘ask’ to the ‘need’, the more fun and successful our fundraising efforts are.

Here are a few examples.

A soccer club is raising money to build a change room for the girls at the club.

My suggestions here were all centred around clothing, dressing up and ‘change’ – all to highlight the ‘why’ of the fundraising. Some ideas I had were:

Clothes/ Fashion Swap
Fashion Parade
A ‘Dressed to the Nines’ trivia night, with interval games such as making the best fashion item out of newspaper and masking tape in 5 minutes.
A ‘Change for Change Room’ campaign – where loose change was collected over a month.

To finish it all off, I suggested that, instead of a fundraising thermometer to measure how they were tracking to target, they instead have a dummy that starts off dressed in white, and then slowly changes to team colours as more money is raised.

An individual is raising money for a cancer bike ride to honour her aunt’s memory

I asked the question: ‘What can you tell me about your aunt?’. She described her aunt as everybody’s go-to person when they were in trouble. Among other interests, she read tarot cards as a hobby and loved champagne.

My ideas:

Have a ‘Bubbly Future’ afternoon – ask her tarot-reading friends to donate their afternoon, invite a dozen friends along for an afternoon of drinking champagne and having their cards read.
Design your own wine label with your aunt’s favourite inspirational quote, or a quote that sums up her outlook on life, and have them applied to bottles of bubbles. Check out the suppliers who’ll do this for you here. Don’t make it too personal so that people who didn’t know her can still feel comfortable buying a bottle. You can create lovely designs free using Canva.com (and no I am not paid by them – I just love it!)

A kindergarten is raising money to resurface a play area prone to flooding

This one was easy for me – a Noah’s Ark theme! Some ideas:

An animal theme for their family fun day, including a pet parade
An art fair with an animal theme
Hold a ‘Dog and Car Wash’
A pet photography session!

A tennis club is wanting to run a small, healthy daytime fundraising event

When I think tennis, I think Wimbledon. Here’s the picture I have in my head:

Bunting and vintage styling, with olden day music playing in the background
Sell strawberries and cream
Sell Pimms (or lemon, lime and bitters for the younger folk) or even better have a ‘Champagne Tent’ (am I projecting here?!?)
A knockout tennis tournament with some local businesses invited to enter teams (hello entry fee!)

These are just some examples to get your juices flowing. When you start with ‘why’ and think outside the box, you can end up with some amazing ideas.

Happy fundraising!

Mandy Weidmann

aka the Fundraising Whisperer

Originally published 20 April, 2016