How to Hold a Successful Fundraiser

I just closed a successful fundraiser with Thirty-One (although this can be used across almost all DS companies) and wanted to share my tips and learnings with this great group. This is not rocket science and certainly not complicated – it doesn’t need to be.

I will list in bullet points as they are probably most easy to follow:

1. The fundraiser was for (3) 12 year-old boys’ baseball travel teams (did not include my kids) so I used a baseball theme throughout. One of my sons plays on a 14 year-old team so it was a natural fit for me – I approached the teams as I knew that they had been doing several fundraisers for travel expenses.

2. From the beginning, I stated that 20% of all sales would be donated (that is my commission less 5% for expenses).

3. I made the team managers my point people so it was up to them to spread the word to their teams, etc.

4. I created a FB EVENT, invited the managers, asked them to invite their teams and friends and I also invited a select group of my own friends and clients (about 20% of the sales came from my existing network).

5. I also created an email with attachments that they could send to their teams/networks since not everyone is on/uses FB (never rely COMPLETELY on social media for anything).

6. I ran the fundraiser for 2 weeks with a hard end-date/time.

7. I gave each manager a hostess packet with (2) full-size catalogs, (10) mini catalogs,  (1) Personalization Guide, a few order forms, several business cards, a cute nail file and an instruction/reference sheet that I created.

8. Participants could shop from the entire catalog – I did not limit it like some do.

9. I posted in the FB event daily – I of course highlighted the monthly special  and also tailored the posts to the group which was of course, mostly sports moms. 

10. In the 2 weeks I also sent 2 additional emails to the managers to forward on.

11. 95% of the orders were made online (easy-peasy) and I tried to instruct people to select “ship to hostess” (me) to save them the direct ship $$ AND so I could professionally bag and include a thank-you card with delivery.

12. While I did not mention giving any Hostess Rewards away, because the PV went way over $1,200, I gave some Hostess $$ to each of the team managers… They were thrilled by the gesture and, since I gave away my commission pretty much (and it took a bit of work to pull this event off), I kept a lot of the rewards for myself – some of which I used to “purchase” items for upcoming silent auction donations for other organizations (I’m quite involved in my community and philanthropy).

Results from all of this? A LARGE “party” with significant PV, a nice donation to the teams (with a tax write-off for me), some hostess perks, good publicity for my Thirty-One biz AND approx. 20 NEW clients!!!