To keep you up-to-date on creative and innovative fundraising ideas, we will occasionally inform you about how others raise funds for their groups and how you can apply their fundraising strategies to your own fundraiser:
One way to raise money for your favorite cause is with an online auction. One branch of the Better Business Bureau in Colorado found this to be the pot of gold when it came to fundraising, managing to raise $13,000 from the online portion of their fundraiser. Online portion, you say? Was there another? Actually, there was. In addition to using BiddingForGood.com to auction off various items like a hot-air balloon ride and a getaway vacation to the Canary Islands, they also had a live auction with some of the items that had been featured online. Combining an online auction with a live one meant that they raised more than twice what they would have raised using only one or the other.
Of course, nothing compares to that old standby, word-of-mouth. Which is what Joshua Wells counted on, when he set a goal to raise $1,200 for the Expedition Inspiration Fund for Breast Cancer Research. He asked people to sponsor him to climb a nearby mountain, Ryan Peak, in order to donate the money to the Fund. He ended up raising nearly twice that amount, at $2,322.
And when it comes to fundraising, sooner or later someone’s gonna bring up magazine sales. Why not do it online? The Marquette Rowing Club did – and they managed to raise $1,700 using the site magfundraising.com. The premise is the one we all know: order magazines from them to raise money for the group. But the twist is that with online sales, there’s no door-to-door selling, so the fundraiser is safe even for school groups. And with it being online, the event can go on all year – raising funds little by little for your organization.
An innovative way to raise funds online is fundable.com. Though many of the projects on this site have a small budget, there’s no reason why anyone couldn’t use it to raise any amount of money. One creative director of the dance group Misnomer Dance Theater used it to raise money for a new choreography routine in New York City, and reached their goal of $800. What sets fundable.com apart from other online fundraising services is that if you don’t reach your goal by the deadline, your supporters aren’t charged anything – ensuring that you won’t be left with partial funds and wondering what to do with it.
Read more about online fundraising, magazine fundraisers and other fundraising ideas.