Minimize Up-front Costs, Maximize Fundraising Efforts

Ever since the recession hit, a lot of charity organizations have found themselves operating on drastically cut fundraising budgets. The light at the end of the tunnel is that many church groups, school teams, and community not-for-profits have been operating on very tight budgets—and doing it successfully—for years.

So how do these charities continue to make money with very little up-front cost? The answer is sales fundraisers, collection drives, and sponsorships that don’t have them buying product up-front, or shelling out for lavish events on their own budgets. Here are our insider tips for maximizing your efforts on fundraisers, charity drives, and sponsorship events with little up-front cash.

Sales Fundraisers

Sales fundraisers are basically fundraisers in which volunteers sell products door to door, or by other means. We recommend you optimize your fundraising dollars by seeking out product fundraisers with little to no up-front purchase such as candy, magazines, candles, cleaning products, or plant sales.

Sales fundraisers are excellent charity events for non-profit organizations with large groups who are willing to sell the items as part of a volunteer agreement. Just think—the more volunteers you have, the fewer items each person will need to sell, so the sale of a few items by each charity member will bring in a lot of money for your organization as a whole. You can encourage even more sales from "super sellers" by setting a fundraising goal, and offering prizes to the volunteers with the highest sales numbers.

Collection Drives

A collection drive can be organized by partnering with a local or online business to raise funds at no up-front cost to your charity. Collection drives make a certain percentage of money via items collected by non-profit volunteers. To run a successful collection drive, you won’t need any up-front funds, but you will need enough time and volunteers to collect a generous number of items.

Many collection drives are planned months in advance to give charities time to get the word out because it can take several months to collect a sizable redemption, which amount to funds for your charity. If you're in a time crunch, you can arrange a collection "blitz," and reach out to the community to pitch in and act as drive volunteers to help with the collection. However, this may take some publicity using the local media. You can also keep it cheap by focusing your event marketing on social media channels. Some of the most successful types of collection drives are:

• Box tops (cut from specially marked grocery products)
• Grocery store receipts
• Soda cans
• Soda can tabs
• Plastic bottles
• Clothing
• School supplies
• Old magazines
• Old newspapers
• Electronics (cell phones, computers, etc.)

Regardless of the items collected, all collection drives work the same way. Your charity group partners with a recycling center or local business to collect items in exchange for redemption funds. Recycling drives—for electronics, soda cans, plastic bottles, or newspapers— also help to promote conservation and environmental awareness among your volunteers, and within your community.

Donations and Sponsorships

Most charities on a budget would forgo a dinner fundraiser because they require dipping into the charity budget to pay for supplies up-front. However, sponsorship support from businesses and individuals in your community can help offset the cost, and even completely absorb it in some cases. These are some of the ways donations and sponsorships can support your charity event:

• A local printer can cover printing costs for your mailings, programs and flyers.
• Local businesses can donate money to cover most, if not all of your event costs in exchange for advertising and publicity.
• Prizes for silent auctions and raffles can be donated by local businesses as well as individuals.
• Local farmers, grocers, butchers, and even restaurants may donate both food and a chef in exchange for promotion.

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