Fundraising for Community Organisations

November 4, 2009 by Mark Currey
Filed under: Uncategorized 

Fundraising has always been a primary source of income for many organisations such as community groups, sporting clubs, and the Parents and Friends (or Parents and Citizens) Associations of schools. With restricted financial help from governments, most of these establishments would not be financially viable without the wonderful and tireless fundraising exploits of their members. For example sporting clubs charge membership fees but with costs ever increasing, it would not be possible for them to exist financially without fundraising.

The types of fundraising opportunities nowadays are many and varied. There is a plethora of fundraising entities around going to try and entice organisations to employ their services. From selling bottled water, wrist bands, homewares, clothing, jewelry and show bags to equestrian riding, shopping tours and engraving bricks and pavers. The alternatives are truly amazing and seemingly endless.

Schools and sporting clubs have traditionally stuck by the time honoured techniques of fundraising by selling donuts, lollies, chocolates and biscuits. Over old few years, however, because of child obesity issues from poor eating traits and beneath exercising, many of these conventional fundraising products have started to fall from favour with fundraising entities.

This has allowed the less traditional fundraising ideas to acquire a foot in the entranceways so to speak of this multi-million dollar industry.

So where do you become when you want to get moving with fundraising? Say for instance your child is in their second year of school, and you have chosen to turn into more actively involved in the comings and goings of their school. You attend the first P and C Association meeting of the year, and you end up on the Fundraising Committee for the year. You like to impress your peers; you want to make a difference and do the job successfully.

There are many reasons why the school might have to fundraise. It may need funds for quite a few extra computers in the library, or new playground equipment or maybe they would love to see a roof over a fresh walkway. How you should behave, where to get moving to raise the required funds? Presently most people are turning to the internet.

The internet has in a very short space of time become the hottest and powerful tool for locating info, far more widely used now than the local newspapers or the yellow pages. When searching for ideas or info, the majority of people now do not consider any options other than the internet. There are many search engines accessible to the internet user, such as Yahoo!, Bing, Altavista, Ask and Lycos. But by far the hottest search engine online is Google.

ComScore is a marketing research company that provides marketing data and services to nearly all of the internet’s largest businesses. According to estimates released by comScore at the end of 2008, Google ended the year with 63.5 percent market share of all search queries performed in the U.S that year! That’s a big slice of the pie.

Google provide a Keyword Tool, which allows access to facts regarding the most popular search phrases used by internet users when searching on Google. The most popular search terms carried over to Google for fundraising are in point of fact fundraising, fundraiser, school fundraising ideas, fundraiser ideas, ideas for fundraising, fundraisers and fundraising ideas.

The results from all of these searches show a wide variety of sites that the user can access, most of them being fundraising directories that list many hundreds of fundraising entities offering their services.

One of the best websites in these search results appears to be goldstar.net.au which is the web address for the Brisbane based company Gold Star Gifts and Stationery. This company supplies novelty stationery and gift items to schools, clubs and organisations Australia wide for fundraising purposes. They provide free delivery, no upfront costs, and the fundraising entity keeps 50% profit from the sales of their products. So if you’re looking for fundraising, fundraiser ideas or fundraisers, check out Goldstar today.

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