Lots of families have many reasons for getting behind a charity. They might have used their services before and want to give something back to the organization. Sometimes, schools team up with a charity and encourage all of their pupils and students to do some fundraising activities and challenges for their chosen charity.
Whatever your reason, it’s always good to do some fundraising for a charitable organization. But if you have never organized a fundraising event or activity before, you are probably wondering how you go about organizing and planning it all. Well, don’t worry - I’ve gathered together some information from those who already have experience putting together charitable events. Here are some of the things that they had wished they’d known before they planned their very first fundraiser.
Think About The Purpose
Sometimes a charitable event isn’t just for fundraising some extra cash for the organization. Sure, that’s part of it, but there are other reasons for hosting a big event too. For instance, the charity might want to increase their visibility. In this case, the event will also have the purpose of spreading the word about the charity and ensuring that more people become aware of it. If this is the case with your event, it’s important that you don’t forget about both purposes, as it can be all too easy to just focus on collecting money and donations. Once you are aware of both purposes, you can then come up with a goal and figure out how to achieve it.
Plan A Budget
Putting a charitable event together isn’t going to be completely free - you are going to have to pay for various things like the venue, catering, and entertainment. You can take the money for these things from all the donations you receive, but then this will minimize the amount going directly to the charity. So, before you start to look into a venue and catering options, you need to figure out how much you have to spend on the event. The best way to do this is to create a budget. Once you’ve got a budget in front of you, you will find it easy to work out how much money you should allocate to various aspects of the event. Plus, the budget will help you from going over budget.
Get Corporate Funding
You will probably realize, fairly early on, that organizing a big charity event is going to be extremely expensive. There is one way you can get extra money to help - you just need to find a company who is prepared to sponsor the event and provide some corporate funding. The best way to approach a company and ask about funding is to send them a sponsorship letter. This should detail the event for them and let them know how their money will go to good use for the charity. It’s a good idea to use a template to write this, and you can get the template here: https://www.the-fund-raiser.com/event-sponsorship-letter/ to ensure that you don’t forget to mention anything. It’s a good idea to send your letter to a few different companies as not all of them will jump at the chance to sponsor a charity event. If you pitch the event to a few companies, you will have more chance of attracting the attention of one.
Marketing Method
Now you need to figure out how you are going to spread the message about your event so that as many people as possible attend. If you want to keep your marketing costs as low as possible, then you should turn to social media. It’s free to set up a Twitter or Facebook profile for your event, and you can then start to invite people to like and follow the page. You need to encourage your fans and followers to share the event so that even more people hear about it. There are other marketing methods you might want to choose as well, though they will cost some money. For instance, you could print out some flyers and posters. It’s also a good idea to send out a press release to your local newspaper and radio stations to try and get some press coverage.
Give Yourself Plenty Of Time
It is super important that you start planning your event well in advance of the planned date. This way, you can take your time, and it won’t be such a rush getting everything ready for the big day. Ideally, you should start your planning and organizing about six months before you want the event to take place. This way, you have plenty of time to look for sponsors, a suitable venue, and to sell tickets if it is going to be a ticketed event. It’s a good idea to use an online planner, like the one from https://www.doodle.com/online-planner, so that you can set yourself deadlines and stick to your established timeframe. Make sure that everyone else who is helping to plan the event is aware of this timeframe and any deadlines so that no one ends up causing the planning stage to be delayed.
Do You Need To Outsource?
Hopefully, you, your family, and all your friends who are helping to organize the big event will be able to pool all of your skills and knowledge, and will have everything that you need. But if you are lacking any specific skills or experience that you need, you might need to outsource and hire someone who can help you. For example, some people like to hire a catering company if they want to put on some food. Others like to outsource their marketing to an agency as it can take up a considerable amount of time.
As you can see, quite a lot of time and effort needs to go into a fundraising event. But it will all be worth it when you can make a big difference to a charitable cause!
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