Tuesday, March 29, 2011

New Fundraising|Unique Fundraising

 

 

Unique Fundraising: Make Your Fundraiser Noticeable

Are you looking for a good way to earn funds and resources for your own school, organization, church group or charity? Then being aware of how to properly choose and organize your fundraiser project is a must. Most of first time organizers just jump in not knowing what to expect in managing complicated projects such as fundraisers. Choosing the right unique fundraising idea and turning it into a success should be one of your objectives. Be sure that your fundraiser ideas are unique so that your fundraising campaign would stand out from others.

            A unique fundraising idea is analogous to success in the fundraising industry especially if it is organized well. But why do you need to make sure that your fundraising event is different and distinct from everybody else? Why not go with the flow and base your project on what they are doing. Looking for inspirations from other fundraising project is good since it would give you a rough idea on how it works. But if you are going to copy them from down up, it is not a good thing to do so. Not only will your fundraiser become less interesting to the customers, the competition will also increase. For example, if every fundraiser project in your community is selling candies, chocolates and other sweet treats; it would be unwise to sell the same thing too. Instead, sell something more unique like scented pencils. In this way, you could attract curious customers and would help your fundraiser project generate sales quickly in little time.

            As all of us know, fundraising projects has been around for a long time already. It is not a new thing for people to participate on these events since they are already exposed to lots of them already. Most of them participate because of their desire to help out the goals and objectives of the fundraising projects. But like most people, your constituents will also get tired of doing the same thing over and over again. Some people might even have bucket loads of candies and chocolates in their storages that selling to them the same products won’t work anymore. Try to think about it, if you are also offered with the same products and with the same approach, most likely you will not buy it anymore. With this knowledge, you can clearly see the importance of being unique and distinct in terms of organizing fundraisers.

            You don’t necessarily need to come up with fresh new ideas every time you try to manage a fundraising campaign. You can always use old but proven and tested fundraising ideas and just add some twist of uniqueness into it. It is very difficult to always come up with something new right there and there since not all fresh ideas are effective or compatible with your fundraising project. Always take into consideration your target market and your area in which you will run the whole fundraiser project. Be sensitive on what can make people curious and excited about your fundraiser project. It has been shown that when people are curious and interested on your activities, there is a high possibility that they will support it. And that’s when you can generate sales.


 



Sunday, March 27, 2011

Easy Fundraising for School

School Fundraiser: Advertising Tips

There are certain times when your school is in need of quick financial income in order to implement their pending projects. This is where a school fundraiser comes in handy. There are various fundraising ideas that you can try for your school if you want to organize one. There are different types as well, like selling products such as chocolates, candies and cookie dough. You can also offer services such as car wash services, cleaning services and baby-sitting services.  Social events such as musical shows, talent shows, movie theatre booths and the like are also popular choices.

            There are literally hundreds of fundraising ideas that you can incorporate for your school fundraiser so make sure to choose the appropriate one that suits your team well. One of the overlooked aspects when it comes to fundraising project is the advertising. Advertising works by informing the people what your campaign is all about, where will the funds go and how they can help. The goals and objectives is the most important part since this will trigger the catalyst for the people to participate in your event. Advertising comes after finishing the main details of your fundraising programs such as the time line, the objectives, the target market as well as the target income.

            As you can observe on the big companies, they advertise a lot. They utilize this strategy in order to increase their sales since advertising is a very effective tool to reach their customers. When you know the product, you buy the product even though you haven’t used it yet. In a fundraising event, the power of advertising can also be used. By significantly advertising to the community about your fundraising event, you can easily catch their attention and would likely participate on it. You advertising tactics should be interesting and should cause curiosity. When people are curios they become excited and when people are excited they share it to others. In this way, not only will you advertise to people directly, they will also advertise to others for free.

            Getting your program endorsed to the public can be done in several ways. One of the effective ways to gain publicity is seeking the help of the media. You can write about the fundraising event and have it publish on your local newspaper. Don’t elaborate everything since publishing a lengthy feature is very expensive. Just include important details, such as the name of your group and the event, the place where it will be held and of course the date. Also include the products, services or events that your project is going to offer as well as the goals and objectives of your fundraiser project. Make sure to keep it short and simple but informative and interesting. Since people nowadays are very careful where they spend their money, make sure that you give them a good reason to participate. If people know that their participation is for a good cause, they would likely participate on it. 



Saturday, March 26, 2011

School Fundraisers That Works

 

Elementary School Fundraiser: Boosting Your Sales Effectively

            Success can be achieved if you act independently on the main strategy for your elementary school fundraiser. But if you want your fundraiser project to be more successful that you intended it to be, you should add in a few interesting stuffs on it. By doing so, you will have big financial returns at the end of your campaign which makes it more meaningful.

            In this article, we’ll discuss the different ways of boosting proceeds for your elementary school fundraiser. The first step that can raise your profits is through sidewalk sales. You can do this by setting up a table in a place where many people usually pass by like malls, parks and intersections as long as there is high traffic of people passing through. By doing this approach, the chance of sales is high and could generate a lot of profit. This strategy can go side by side with your volunteer team doing door to door sales. Not only will you distribute the tasks evenly, but your team will save a lot of time and effort in reaching your fundraiser’s target net profit. Group your team into small groups so that they can cover a lot of houses and at the same time watch over your sales booth. Be sure that they have their own schedules so that there will be no overlapping of responsibilities and they can eat their meals and rest. A two-hour shift on each team is highly recommended.

            The next strategy is to get ready for a no sale response, just in case if one of your likely customers isn’t interested in your offer. This strategy lets you know that it isn’t recommended to walk away from a potential customer even if he/she isn’t interested in your offer. In essence, an effective and successful seller should know how to persuade customers to purchase the product. You can remind consumers on the possible benefits as well as how they can help out with your fundraiser if they decide to buy your product. With this in mind, you can turn a negative decision into a positive one very easily. Giving away gift certificates is also a good application for this strategy. This way, your income will also increase. To have the best promising deal for your customer, the use of national merchants is advisable.

            By combining various fundraising ideas, you can also raise your income. For instance, if you want to plan for a movie night event, you can’t just sell only tickets; you can also sell snacks and drinks for your customers. Think of it as your profit booster. This way, you can combine your profits in selling tickets, snacks and drinks into one.

            When you receive your goods from your fundraising company, you can ask for discounts. You can ask them the price of their supplies and ask them if that’s their best offer. You can also ask them if there are discounts on bulk orders. With discounts, you are able to increase your income since you are able to sell your goods at a very reasonable price and can still earn from every product sold.

 



School Fundraisers That Works

Preschool Fundraising: Excellent Ideas on How to Start

            Organizing a preschool fundraising event is fun and enjoyable especially if your team is doing it for a good cause. Although they can easily generate money, they can be very tricky to organize. There are various fundraiser ideas that you can try out but there are different factors that you should consider before trying them out. I’ll be discussing three excellent fundraiser ideas in this article in which you can start organizing immediately.

            To begin with, let us discuss on how to set up a great event for your preschool fundraising project. This kind of fundraising idea is proven to be effective if you want to produce large amounts of money within a short period of time. It is also very flexible since you can incorporate different event ideas into it as well as adjusting how large the scale of the event suits you. Organizing them on weekends is highly recommended since people don’t have work and they can easily participate on your planned events. Events such as cookouts, dinner dance or even musical events are sure winners and people will surely take part on them. Pre-school students can easily partake on these events especially on musical events since they can also show the community their talents and skills. You can also involve them in your planning stage so that they can learn on how to raise money and organizing big events such as this. Your fundraising campaign can be a very good exposure to the students that they may learn how to socialize with the community as well as the value of hard work. Always remember to choose a fundraiser event that will let the kids to participate and will easily fit your budgeted money and time.

            Another excellent fundraiser idea is the raffle fundraising event. Organizing raffles is fun and exciting for people because these give people a chance to win amazing prices. These kinds of fundraising events are effective in raising large funds for a short period of time. Since people will be looking forward for the prizes, make sure that the prizes up for grab are interesting and very good. Remember that the prizes you are going to feature in your event will determine the total number and amount of each ticket that you should sell for your campaign. You can even save money for your event from donations made by business establishment on your community in exchange for free advertising. Many companies will support you especially if your event is very good and people will flock into it.

            And lastly, you can choose to organize a discount fundraising campaign. People love to have discount cards especially food discounts such as pizza. This is very easy since you can easily set-up your fundraising event with a local pizza shop in which people can get huge discount by purchasing from them. Your company sponsor will provide the means to get people interested through their discount cards and your fundraising event will help in the distribution. These discount cards normally generate an income of about $8 from each successful sale.



Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Dallas Cookie Dough Fundraiser

 

Cookie Dough Fundraisers: How To Make Them Effective

            Raising funds for your activities in school, charitable organization and other social gathering is a good way to produce money easily; especially when people in your community support the good cause of your activities. One of the challenges that you have to deal when organizing this kind of project is where to start and what kind of fundraiser idea you are going to go with. For first time organizers of this kind of project, I would suggest that you should go with cookie dough fundraisers. They are easy, quick and very effective in terms of raising money for your activities.

            Cookie dough fundraisers are one of the winners in the fundraising industry today simply because they can easily raise funds through sales and very quick to organize. You should consider this type of fundraising idea if you want a sure success in organizing a fundraiser. A cookie dough fundraising campaign is an order taker type of program in which you won’t be handing out your products upfront but instead you will be bringing order forms and brochures. When your team delivers their sales pitch, they will be handing out order forms and sales brochures to customers so that they can have a look at what kind of products you are selling. Since your sales brochures give them an idea about your products, it should be printed clearly so that they can understand.

            Since you will be doing this for the first time, it is a good idea to acquire the services of an excellent fundraising company. The company should be professional fundraisers that are experts in doing these kinds of projects. The fundraiser company serves as both your supplier for your products and adviser. Basically, after your team has collected the order forms from your customers, you should forward these forms to your fundraising company and they will supply you with the pre-ordered products. The company should offer low-priced products but with very good quality. They should also provide you with excellent brochures so that you can encourage customers to take part on your campaign. You will be able to gain more funds if the company offers them at a reasonable price and in return you can sell these products to customers at a low price also. People will more likely to buy your product if they are priced cheaply but are very delicious. Make sure that they also offer a wide variety of cookie flavors so that your customers will have a lot of choices when purchasing from you. It has been shown that people are likely to buy products that have lots of variety since they have the freedom to choose and can also increase their curiosity. And that curiosity causes people to buy from you.

            Most fundraising companies also offer assistance in terms of planning what is the most excellent fundraising idea you should incorporate in your campaign. This makes your project more effective in producing sales within your target marketing time. After choosing an excellent fundraising company, you should work on making a sales script for your team to become more effective and showing them how to do it properly. The sales script is one of the things that make customers interested and curious about your fundraiser campaign so be sure that they are excellent.

            

 



Sunday, March 6, 2011

Unique Fundraising Ideas: Go For Mardi Gras

Unique Fundraising Ideas: Go For Mardi Gras

            Doing a fundraising campaign or program requires a lot of careful thinking and effort. When you set out to do a fundraiser, you have to make sure that you lay down the foundation right so that you can be certain that when you add in the other details, they won’t fall down. This is comparable to building a house of cards wherein you have to see to it that the cards that are at the bottom are arranged well so that when you stack more cards, the entire thing won’t easily break down. A good way to lay a strong foundation in the fundraising industry is through the use of unique fundraising ideas.

            Your unique fundraising ideas are your foundation when raising funds because this will serve as your starting point. No matter how careful you are in planning and executing your fundraiser if the fundraiser idea that you used in the first place is something really boring and stupid, you will never be able to reach your fundraising goals and objectives effectively. For instance, if you set up a sales fundraiser whose products are rocks, you will never be able to generate your desired number of sales no matter how hard you try. You’re selling rocks. Who’s interested to buy these? There are some who are interested but not a lot. If you want to grab the interest of people, you can easily do so through a Mardi Gras event. This is a fun event where people can enjoy lots of good music as well as great food while getting the chance to let their hair down using some really unique costumes and attractive necklaces.

            To get a Mardi Gras fundraiser event started, you first need to look for a huge meeting hall that can offer room for live music or DJ music booth. As for your tables and chairs, you can get these from a rental shop. You have to book everything well ahead of time so that you can launch your event during the date that you think would be most ideal for it. After you finish working on your venue, the next thing you have to attend to is food and drinks. As for your food, you can contact a good local restaurant in your area. Make sure that the food that you’re going to get is offered at a reasonable cost. Next in line is music. This is also a very important detail of your event. You have to choose tunes that give out a Mardi Gras flavor so that you can really set the mood for your event. If you can book a live act for your event, this would be a better thing to do.

            You can raise money in two ways with this type of fundraiser event. First is through admission tickets. You can use the revenue from this one to cover all of your expenses. Set two price levels for your tickets namely one that includes dinner and one that doesn’t. Secondly, you can set up a raffle for your event.

Sports Fundraiser: Know Where The Money Is

Sports Fundraiser: Know Where The Money Is

 

            If you were a robber and you’re thinking as to where you can get the largest amount of money within your city, a bank will surely immediately into your mind. You have to use the same premise when you’re doing a sports fundraiser. Now, I’m not trying to say that you should rob a bank just so you can earn big amounts of funds for your sports teams. Instead, you should be well aware of the best locations within your community where you can easily and quickly generate huge amounts of sales.

 

            Using the right location is key to the success of your sports fundraiser  regardless of you’re doing a products sales campaign, hosting an event, or offering services to people such as car wash services. Now, you may be thinking all this time that you can only earn good money by targeting your family, friends, neighbors, relatives, and co-workers. However, you should know that aside from your usual prospects, there’s still a whole lot of money in lots of other places that are just lying right under your nose. You just have to go where they are.

           

            Let’s look at the best locations where you can effectively raise funds without too much effort. When you’re determining the best places to do fundraisers, you should think of spots where lots of people usually go to. These places usually include locations where lots of people do their shopping. When people are out to shop, they have money in their pockets and you can get some of that cash by offering your products in the right places. The best places where you can offer high quality fundraising products include drug stores, grocery stores, home improvement stores, and shopping malls. Drug stores are considered as good entry level sales spots. These places usually have some good sidewalk space available. Home improvement stores on the other hand are known as big traffic spots during the weekends because this is where lots of do it yourself people start their next project. Grocery stores are considered as perfect hunting grounds for people who are doing product fundraisers. Small but high quality food items do really well in these areas. Shopping malls may be quite difficult to get approved especially if you plan on using outside space but setting a booth that’s near the food court is a really brilliant idea.

           

            Most of the locations that I have mentioned above are quite big, which means that you can set your sales booth in different areas. Even though you’re already at the right location, you still need to determine where the perfect spot is. In order for you to do this, you have to do some research as to where exactly the most number of people go to when they’re in these places. You can try asking the person in charge of the place so that you can get the accurate information that you need. Lastly, never fail to ask permission.

Team Fundraisers: Sell Pizza

Team Fundraisers: Sell Pizza

            Team fundraisers are really something that’s popular nowadays because of the huge need of different sports teams for good funds so that they can go on playing the sport that they love. If you’ve been having problems with thinking of a good fundraiser idea that will allow you to earn large amounts of funds without too much effort, then you should do a pizza fundraiser campaign.

            With pizza team fundraisers, you can earn or raise funds in three different ways namely by: selling pizzas per slice; selling pizza discount cards; and selling pizza kits or pizza supplies. Each of these three different fundraising campaign vary in terms of requirements, effort, and profitability. Let’s start discussing the first fundraising option that you can try. When you sell pizza by the slice, you have to buy your products in bulk so that you can get some good discounts for them. When you place in your orders, make sure that you tell your supplier that you want your items to be delivered fresh and hot at your event. Choose a popular pizza parlor that offers really good products so that you no longer have to do a lot of convincing to people when you do your selling. You have to know that you have to pay for your supplies in cash when they get delivered. Selling each one of your slices as close to a 100 percent markup will allow you to earn at least $2 for every $1 in cost that you spend. By having this kind of markup, you can cover for damaged and unsold products. A good tip to follow for this one would be choosing famous flavors such as pepperoni and plain cheese.

            Let’s move on to the discount cards. These kinds of fundraising products are designed to offer great discounts from a single merchant, which is typically a national chain. This typically offers 2-for-1 discounts for every single order that’s made at the merchant’s store and is often priced at $10. Discount cards are good at catching the attention of people not only because of the wonderful discounts that they provide but as well because of the length of time as to how long they can be used by people. Discount cards often last for a year. Offers that are featured in discount cards can vary from a single location to small group of different outlets for a national chain. Look for the best discount card offers so that you can use products that are really easy to sell out to people.

            The last option that you have for this fundraiser idea is selling frozen pizza kits. These are basically do it yourself kits that allow people to make their very own pizzas at home. These are really popular to small kids. Selling these frozen kits is comparable to doing a cookie dough fundraiser because this involves doing an order-taker type of sales campaign. This is also a really good thing to try out because this option offers a good profit margin that ranges from 30 to 40 percent.

Saturday, March 5, 2011

Middle School Fundraising: Try Fruits

Middle School Fundraising: Try Fruits

            A good way to do a middle school fundraising campaign is by selling fruits. This type of fundraiser idea works best during the season of fall because the holidays are fast approaching and fresh fruits are really a good treat for the entire family. Moreover, moms love fruits because they use these to make holiday fruit bowls, which makes for a pristine centerpiece.

            So, how do you get things started for this middle school fundraising program? Well, you can do so by deciding what kinds fruits you want to sell. Citrus fruits are among the easiest to sell out because they’re really popular. You can offer your customers grapefruit, oranges, tangerines, oversized juice oranges, and other varieties of winter favorites. You can also sell fresh apples in a wide array of flavors. After you finish choosing the products that you want to sell, you have to decide on their prices. You also have prepare good quality sales brochures, which your sales volunteers are going to use when they kick start your sales campaign. Sales brochures are going to be necessary for this type of fundraiser because your customer are going to base their orders based on the images, prices, and the sales pitch that you’re going to show them. Bringing lots of fruits would be a huge hassle for your sales volunteers so it would be way better for you to do things like an order taker campaign instead. As I’ve mentioned prices, you have to look for a good supplier for your fundraiser. Choose one that offers really affordable prices so that you can increase the success rate of your campaign by offering products that people can easily afford.

            Your sales pitch is the next most important thing that you need to work on. When you’re writing down the lines of your sales pitch, you have to put good emphasis on three things namely the name of your school and its details; the cause you’re working on; and the line where you’re going to ask for help from your customers. Showing up at someone’s door step with a sales brochure in your hand won’t be enough for you to encourage and convince your customers to buy what you have to offer them. You have to give people a pretty good reason to buy from you. You have to make sure that your sales volunteers deliver your sales pitch properly. When saying their lines, your sales volunteers should look people in the eye. The sales pitch should always start with a good greeting. The words should contained in the sales pitch should be clearly stated. And, you should always make use of the word “because” since this is a very powerful term that will boost the convincing powers of your sales pitch.

            Aside from selling fruits alone, you can also offer certain kinds of candy as well as seasonal items that go well with fresh fruits. By offering these additional items, you can boost the profit potential of your sales fundraiser.