Fundraising Ideas - not asking for pledges!

In My Humble Opinion
1

I desperately need some fundraising ideas.

My nephew (10) and I are joining the “Joints In Motion” marathon team and need to raise about $2500.00 each to participate in the Walt Disney Marathon in Jan 2009.

I am just looking for ideas on how to raise money - anything you can think of will be considered.

We are running on behalf of my daughter who was diagnosed with JRA (Juvenile Rhematoid Arthritis) when she was two and a half. Since she was injected that January she hasn’t had a re-occurence (thank goodness).

Joints in Motion helps train you and pays all of the transportation, accommodation and entry fees for the race. We are VERY excited about this and will be registering in the next few weeks.

Anyway, we need ideas that are suitable for:

Him (as a child) alone (car wash, yard sale etc)
Me (as an adult) alone (social, crafts)
To do together (perogy sale, bingo bowl)

Any tips/suggestions are more than welcome!

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Sorry - needed to subscribe

3

Most of my fundraising has been as a small group effort but things we’ve done that work well are:

Yard sales
Bake sales (always go down well with kids)
Treasure hunt
Barge pull (obviously won’t work if you don’t have a boat and a river to hand)
School Sports Day
Bingo (with forfeits, of course)
Car wash
If you work, get people to sponsor you to wear a fancy dress outfit for the day
If your son is at school, perhaps the same fancy dress could happen in class
Start a page somewhere like “justgiving.com” and attach the address to all your emails
Ask your friends if they would like to do any events to help out - coffee mornings etc can be good

4

I am partial to things that actually add value.

I like the car wash.

What about leaf raking/ lawn mowing/ snow shoveling?

5

Snow shoveling/leaf raking could work - we are pretty much out of season for lawn mowing.

6

How about babysitting? Running errands for people?

7

Table/pub quizzes are popular here for fundraising.

8

Can people make donations directly to the charity, to count for your share? A few years back, we got a mailing from one of my kid’s teachers, about donations to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, to sponsor her entry into the Marine Corps Marathon. IIRC, the deal was they provided her entrance fee (and a guaranteed slot) and assistance with training for the marathon, in return for her raising money. Dunno if she had a specific target.

Anyway, long story short, if that’s one of the options, I wouldn’t think it would be offensive to send out a mailing to friends/family along the lines of “if you’d like to support this, donate to XXX society and designate it for Poyson-and-nephew’s account”.

This is, of course, in addition to other activities.

The car wash is a good idea but you need a few people to chip in and do the work. Dweezil’s scout troop has raised 500+ dollars at each of two car washes (at a popular service station); Moon Unit’s troop raised 450 or so at the same location.

9

I recall reading a newspaper story about a school doing a “boat race” in their town. Paper boats were “bought” for a dollar or two, and on the day of the big race, the boats (with the owner’s name on them) were all placed in the water in the town’s river, and the first one to cross the finish line some distance away would win a prize. I presume the river that was used was slow moving enough to make it easy to pick up all the boats at the end! I thought it sounded like a great idea, and it would certainly be fun to see!

And something more-or-less stolen out of American Gods, but more environmentally friendly; I see you live in Winnipeg, so is it safe to assume that once rivers/lakes/swimming pools freeze for the winter, they tend to stay that way until spring-ish? If so, see if there is a public pool the city won’t drain, or your own pool, or something, get a Tonka Truck or similar, and place it in the middle of the frozen pool. Set up a 24hr webcam, and start taking bets on what date and time the truck will fall into the water in the springtime. Basically, sell raffle tickets up til a certain day (Say, January 15th, chosen entirely at random), and the person who guesses the correct date and time gets a portion of the proceeds. Probably best to do so in a small town/neighbourhood, since the number of available tickets will be somewhat limited, but I’m sure it could be a lot of fun, and not that intensive!

I’m sorry to hear that your daughter has JRA. My sister was diagnosed with it at about 12/13 years of age, and it’s been rediagnosed as Ankylosing Spondylitis since she’s been an adult. It is a very tough thing to watch someone grow up with a disease like that; I’m glad the medicine they gave your daugher works. Must be tough to find solutions for someone that young, who is still growing. I hope it continues to do so. Sis started off on Motrin/Tylenol, moved up to Vioxx, which stopped being effective (about a year or so before it got pulled from the market), then a couple years of methotrexate/indomethacin, and this past year she’s been taking Enbrel, which is near miraculous for her! She still has bad days, but so much less than before, and her “average” daily pain is diminished. There were times growing up when she couldn’t get out of bed, but she’s a positive, motivated person, and none of this has stopped her from obtaining 2 bachelor’s degrees and now pursuing her dream of becoming a vet. I’m very proud of her.

Congrats to you and your nephew for “doing something about it”, and I wish your daughter well.

10

Ooh - what about one of those eBay auctions where you say you’ll wear some advertising thing touting the winner’s product / webpage / whatever? I wonder if you could, say, wear a sandwich board while walking around town for a couple of hours. Basically let yourself look foolish for a cause :slight_smile:

11

We did one at my kids’ school for Katrina relief that was a lot of fun. It’s a bit complicated, so bear with me.

Each “team” gets a bucket for the donations. Every penny is worth one point.

Pennies and paper money are “positive” points.

Silver coins (quarters, dimes, and nickels) are “negative points.”

So, if you have a dollar and a quarter in your bucket, you have 75 points. The way to win is to accumulate points.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

You would put pennies and paper money in “your” bucket, and throw the silver coins in the other team’s buckets. So all the money goes to charity, but you get into a nice little war with the other teams!

So if you want to get the school involved, it might be a lot of fun.

12

There’s a similar event here with rubber duckies. :slight_smile:

13

I was going to mention this, with some big caveats:

  1. You need a lot of people to make it work, and make it profitable.
  2. Adults did most of the car washing, and closely supervised the rest.
  3. The location Mama Zappa references is great for fund-raising car washes. So much so that the car washing slots fill up months in advance. When we did another car wash across the street, we raised a lot less money.
  4. Ask for a minimum donation. Otherwise people will bring in their van, and let you wash it by hand for a buck.

If you go ahead with a car wash, PM me and I’ll send you more details based on my experience.

Dweezil’s Boy Scout Troop also sells Christmas Wreaths, and has for several years. That needs to be arranged in advance with the wreath company. (There are several that do this.) I think it works for us because nobody else does it in our area. It’s not band candy, magazine subscriptions, Girl Scout cookies, Boy Scout popcorn, or miscellaneous school giftcrap.

Could you fundraise like a walk-a-thon? Ask for donations based on the distance of the marathon, or the distance to the marathon from where you live? Give your donors a receipt in the form of a thank-you note? Just a thought.

Best of luck to you - y’all are doing a great thing!

Oh, and Hi Opal!

14

Since Christmas stuff is in the stores already (bah humbug) you could try making and selling inexpensive Christmas tree ornaments - maybe with the “Joints in Motion” logo or the JRA logo to make it personal. Our Booster Club asked the hockey players to do one each a few years ago - we provided the materials - and did a silent auction which was quite succesful.

15

Great ideas all - we were a little discouraged today to find out the info via phone was wrong - it lists 4000.00/runner as the amount needed.

We are still going to try it though - money is tight for my sister and my nephew would never get to DW any other way as a child.

Mama Zappa yup the Arthritis society does do the webpage thing - I am going to send out letters to EVERYONE, even companies, if each gave a few buckes we’d be there in NO time.

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4,000 apiece - eek! That’s a load of cash to raise. When would you have to have it raised by? Jan 2009? At least that’s a fair bit of time.

Are you or your sister members of a church or other group that might help with fundraising activities? e.g. people to staff the car wash, maybe take up a collection or something?

I remembered that there’s a doper whose daughter has an autism dog. Did some searching and it’s Gfactor, if he happens to stumble across this thread. This is relevant because the agency they got the dog from requires you to fundraise some amount of money. Maybe he might have some suggestions for how to do something like this.

17

Another idea is to put together a website/blog with all the info about your family, the walk, how to donate electronically, and then pass the link around. Then you can reach out to lazy and forgetful people like me, who do everything online. There are plenty of sites with WYSIWYG editors that are easy to use, so I’m sure your nephew could help put together something nice. Some friends of mine used blogspot for their wedding webpage (not really fundraiser but they had travel and registry info), I know it got a lot of hits and comments.

18

The more you have participating, the better this works -
Each person knocks over as many convenience stores as they can in 8 hours, the winner gets to keep any candy acquired in the robberies, second place gets the cigarettes, third gets chips/lighters/etc. Cash goes towards the trip.

Oh, wait… That might not work so well in conjunction with a marathon. Never mind.