Building a better world, one community at a time

Holiday Drive Fundraiser

Posted Sun, 2009-11-01 18:08 by rachel
Hey all, This is my first attempt at a blog communication chain. Perhaps we can replace our email chains with blog postings? Let's see if it works. Our fundraising committee is planning a holiday drive fundraiser for the chapter. We discussed this at the last SC meeting. Part of the discussion revolved around how the chapter is going to fundraise while not overlapping into the individual project team fundraising. Last year, some project teams were successful at raising funds through a project-specific holiday drive. Now we are attempting this as a chapter. I'm unclear as to how the project teams feel about doing this as a chapter - are the teams ok with using the chapter-wide holiday drive email or cards to advertise to their contacts, thereby raising funds for the chapter instead of their project? I personally think it is better to do chapter-wide fundraising to concentrate our efforts, but am aware that some teams might prefer to do their own fundraising. Any thoughts? Clarifications for me?

Comments

Looking at the successes we

by guest - 2009-11-03 11:55
Looking at the successes we have had in past holiday drives, many of the donors were connected to a specific project (e.g. Carolyn's brother, so and so at CH who works with Steve). I think our best selling point is definitely the projects instead of the chapter. You really have to have that connection to the person, and from that you build a connection to the project in order to justify a sizable donation. People can rationalize that organizations will make it through the hard times with or without their support. They probably feel more motivated to know that a certain project, a certain community, is at risk without their donation. What I can't tell you is whether putting all the projects on a single flier and emailing that flier over and over again to all our extended network (e-blast + friend/family network) is a better approach than having a single flier for each team and having the teams take care of distributing it to only their part of the network. I tend to think that project team members are more likely to forward to friends families and co-workers if a) the flier highlights their project, and b) they *know* that the money will come back to the project. If there is a doubt, they might hold off on the chapter-wide holiday drive and ask friends to support the project directly. Maybe we put together an email/pdf that has each of the (3) projects highlighted prominently, and has a button to donate to each, or the general chapter. This would be a service to the teams, and also suitable for general distribution. I *think* that 3 projects on a flier is reasonable without overwhelming people.