So you need to do some fundraising...

In this first post I'm only going to give you an idea of my experience in this field and maybe talk a little bit about some of the things to come.

My first major experience in fundraising came when my wife signed us up for the American Stroke Association's "Train To End Stroke" program. The ASA is a subsidiary of the American Heart Association. We raised money and trained for our first marathon (See Runner Haven blog) with the TTES team. In fact over the following 4 years my wife joined them as a fundraiser three more times (So I was involved to one degree or another as well.) I think in all we/she raised around $12,000.00.

We raised over $5,000.00. Some of it from direct mail type letters to friends and family. That is always an option if the issue addressed by your particular charity/cause has a broad appeal. It can get pretty pricey to mail out a couple of hundred letters with SASE's, informational brochures, credit card donation forms etc.

We also set up booths at local grocery or department stores. We made posters, themed cookies to give away, had balloons (themed). This was a fairly successful way to raise funds at certain locations, and if the weather was not too cold, rainy, windy (very bad, blows all of your flyers and brochures around, blows the balloons into people trying to talk to you or write a check, no, windy isn't good at all in this situation).

One of the most productive things we did was to set up a karaoke contest. It will probably take a couple of posts to tell you all about that. We also planned a wine tasting party, that we couldn't quite get to happen, for a variety of reasons, but I suspect that it would have been the most successful of all our events.

Something that didn't work at all was a direct mail campaign to a great number of large businesses and corporations along with a couple of hundred phone appeals. You need to plan a year in advance to get monetary donations from large companies. They budget these kind of things way in advance.

These are some of the things that we are going to work on and talk about in this blog. Please post comments, questions, ideas and let me know where you would like this blog to go.

I'll be talking to you soon,