Scrapbooking fundraisers are a great way to turn a favorite pastime into a fundraising opportunity.
That's right, scrapbooking fundraisers turn cherished memories into proceeds that can go towards youth group field trips, church renovations, sports team equipment, or pure donations for a community shelter, or local non-profit doing good work in your community.
Similar to a quilting fundraiser, a scrapbooking fundraiser makes a rather isolated hobby into a social event. It gives scrapbookers the chance to meet and chat with other like-minded hobbyists.
A scrapbooking bee (like a quilting bee) puts out the call to scrapbookers from your neighborhood, city, state, and even country to use their love of scrapbooking to help the less fortunate. A gathering of this sort can really turn a passion into a profitable pastime for your worthy cause.
Scrapbooking fundraisers work like this:
- Participant scrapbookers pay a registration fee
Or
- Scrapbookers collect individual donations from community pledges toward their hours scrapbooked
Or
- Donations are collected from the community via a general source (a charity website or charity office) to sponsor a one-of-a-kind scrapbook memorializing, for instance, the history of the town or a popular historic monument.
Additional funds are raised when participants:
- Register to win prizes, for instance, supplies and books about scrapbooking
- Participate in a silent auction
- Enter in a drawing for free scrapbooking classes
- Take part in a charity marathon—a challenge to see how many albums or pages individual scrapbookers can finish within a certain timeframe
- Are judged on their creation of a scrapbook project that commemorates a certain memorable place or event
Teaching Digital Scrapbooking
Digital scrapbooking (or e-scrapbooking) opens the door to a whole new level of fundraising for your charity. And better than traditional scrapbooking, those interested, but without an artistic hand, can suddenly create memorabilia with a little computer savvy, some knowledge of the Internet, and familiarity with a photo editing software program.
Here are four profitable ways your organization can take advantage of the digital scrapbooking phenomenon:
- Host a site with ready-made scrapbooking templates and charge users a fee to download individual templates.
- Instead of using paper, glue and glitter, scrapbookers upload their digital photos from the Internet, a digital camera, or a scanner (for hard copy images). Make money for your organization when you charge scrapbookers a fee per photo downloaded. Once the fee is paid, they will be able to manipulate elements of their picture (remove red eye, add digital captions, resize, and use different backgrounds) until the desired effect is achieved.
- Charge scrapbookers a flat fee to download the final, electronic copy of the scrapbook they’ve created via your website. Let scrapbookers download a copy of their master file and print complete copies to give as gifts. Or, electronic pages can be sent instantly to family and friends via the Internet, rather than running the risk of having the book get lost in via snail mail.
- If you can gain sponsorship from a printing house, offer to print and bind pages into an album at extra expense to scrapbook authors. Since these books are great memorabilia, they make great gifts for family and friends. Take advantage of this by turning e-scrapbooks into digital PDFs. This PDF format links text and graphics into one downloadable and printable file.
