Before I get started here I am sure that I will not be able to cover the majority of the good ideas because there is probably 100’s of wonderful ideas on how to raise money for a charity, these 4 ways are the ways that I have found to work out best for the people we have done business with in the recent past. So without further fluff lets get into it.

1. Magazine Fundraising - no inventory, around 40% of the profit goes to your charity and it is something that a lot of people want to have. Granted this is a big seller and has a lot of success, I am not a personal fan of this method. The magazines are ones where I would never have a subscription. I have nothing against the magazines, but I don’t have much time to read a lot of things I am not extremely passionate about, and celebrities lives are one of those things. Sorry for the rant, but there are a lot of people that enjoy this and in the past these have sold really well for fundraisers.

2. Coupon Books – These are beneficial to both the charity and the person getting the book. Plus these are also beneficial to the merchant that has the coupon in the book. The reason this is so successful is that it is a win win win, all the way around.

3. Silent Auctions – These tend to drawn in a lot of people that are intending to spend money at the event. Plus these can be a lot of fun, you can find items that will be donated or you can get items that come on consignment to your organization, like the items you can find here on this site.

4. Raffles – This is by far the best way to raise money for your charity. The reason is the overhead is rather low, just the paper to print the items, there is no hassling with inventory. The items that are up for raffle are quality travel or big ticket items and the price to enter is always really low. Granted we may have a little bit of bias to why we think this is the best, but we have done all the others in the past and have found that the amount of money that can be earned through this method is the most and can be the quickest.

This should give you and your board a good idea of where to start out. These ideas have all worked and it is a good idea to try them all out. Rotating them at different times throughout the years, holding them at different times that make sense. The different times are all dependent on what type of organization you are in. Schools will be on different schedules than regular charities and visa versa.

First off good for you, this is a really big endeavour and many have tried and not gotten very far with it.  But if you are a determined person and passionate about your cause, then you should first pat yourself on your own back.  People like you make all the difference in the world today. So enough with that lets get into what to do to really get it going.

1. Setup a goal of what you would like to accomplish in the first year of being up and running.  This is a great first step because you want to have your goals on paper and in a checklist.  It is said that 5 hours of preparation will save 20 hours of execution.

2. Figure out where you are going to obtain your funding sources.  A good start would be look at what it will take to do fundraisers, silent auctions, etc.  Then you might want to first get some money and support from Foundation Center.  There you can find all sorts of information that is out about how to get funding and then they have an excellent directory to use to make it easier to find the places to get the funding.

3.  Get a good understanding of your states regulations and what is needed to please them to develop a 501(c)(3).  Of course I would suggest you either go down the route of using Nolo or going to source the government.

4. Once you have everything in place for your state you are 50% of the way there.  This seems to be half of the battle, next make sure that you are all good with the IRS.  You want to make sure that you are covered and going to be tax-exempt.  You can make sure of this by filing out the proper forms.  The form that you will need to start with is the Application for Recognition of Exemption Under Section 501(c)(3).

Be patient with this last step as it will take some time for them to get everything together.  Honestly have you ever had anything that dealt with the government be a short process?

This is of course just the start of everything.  But it is a very good start.  Getting all of the legal and government stuff out of the way is the best first steps.  As it will take the longest to get going.  But once you get past this point it will become easier with the other things you do.  This should give you the gusto to keep the momentum going.

Good luck with everything.

When putting on a fundraising event it is very important to make sure that everything is by the book and falls into place correctly and smoothly. There are a lot of technical issues that can arise and getting all of the required paper work done right for non-profit organizations is a lot of work. Being that it is a non-profit and a lot of people will be volunteering their time you will want to make sure that you can get the best group of people to help run your charity events.

That is why a really good board of directors is important. You want as much as you can to get a very diverse board with many talents behind them. People that are passionate about the cause and what you are doing are required. The reason for this is because, if the person is not passionate about the cause and really believes in the change you are doing, they are likely to drop out or not put a 110% into the work at hand once it starts getting really busy.

The ideal board of directors will have people with finance, human resources, event planning, marketing and law. Now we know that this can be a really difficult task to get all these diverse backgrounds in one place, with a passion in them, etc. But it can be done, it will just take a little bit of work. It may not start out this way but in time with enough publicity and consistency, those personality types will start to come out of the woodworks and be on board for your cause.

One of the most important positions that you will want to have filled is the position of executive director. This position needs to be filled with someone that is an type-A personality, but with a balance and willing to take opinion from others. They need to be able to push people and have very good organizational skills.

There seems to be a lot of things that could make or break a silent auction. From the food to the entertainment to the amount of people that attend. Getting everything correct and having it run smoothly is a feat by anyones standards.

But one of the main things that can make a silent auction a great success is the entertainment. Having the right entertainment in place and booked can make the attendance increase and make the people that attend in a lot better mode.

Honestly a year from now, there is a small chance that people will remember what they ate, what music was playing and who all they met. But they will remember if someone that is a big deal came to the event and spoke and did a meet and greet afterwards.

Getting these people to your event can be a little difficult and can take some time, but it is well worth it in the end. The best thing to do is to think of who you think your audience will be interested in. There are a large number of celebrities and local celebrities that do their part to be apart of different charities. Start by researching this and seeing if there is any chance that someone like this would like to come and visit your event.

Reach out to their publicists and get an idea of their schedules, this way you will know if they would even be available to show up even if they have the time.

It can take some effort and will probably take a lot of handholding and focus, but with enough effort, there is a good chance that celebrities will show up to your event. They need to do this for their own reasons and they just need to find the correct charity to do it with.

It also might be a good idea to think of your geographical location in the world. If you are wanting to get celebrities to fly out to your event, then this might take more effort, if on the other hand they can get in their car and drive to the event in the same city your chances increase dramatically.

Currently maybe your company is doing automatic deductions for your health insurance and maybe your 401k. But there has been a lot talk recently about deductions for charitable giving. This seems like a good idea, but then again is it really something that is a good thing?

One of the main organizations that will accept your automatic deductions is United Way. This seems to be the best option because they distribute the donations out to all kinds of different types of charities.

However there are pros and cons to every situation. Pros being that you are able to contribute to your favorite charity automatically and still do it before taxes and have the deductions at the end of the year. On the other-hand there is another company reaching their hands in your bank account and taking out your hard earned money. Of course here the pros out weighing the cons is a matter of opinion. I would vouch to have my charitable donations go to where I feel like every month. I might see something on TV that has drawn my attention and maybe this month I feel like contributing to that cause instead. Or God forbid something like Katrina happens again and all of my monies are now going to be directed that way.

One of the only real great benefit to having automatic deductions is that there is no thought process that goes along with it. It is automatically coming out. Overall it is a decision that you will have to make for yourself, but I believe that it is best to do it manually

So you can’t go somewhere without seeing people wearing the wristbands. Granted they are pretty cool and it seems everyone has the yellow ones and they are more trendy and people forget that they support a cause. I was curious if there is going to be something that will take its place as the new thing.

It seems that if you want to raise the capital for your charity you will have to bring in a lot of funds and if you are giving someone something for their donation you will have to keep it to a certain cost to your organization. That is why the wristbands work so well is because they are so cheap to produce and the overhead of them is easy to manage.

Before the wristbands there were the lapels and little flags that you could wear with your outfits. That is still a good idea and it is rather cheap to produce. But with the world moving to be online, why not try to integrate something people could use on their social profiles? Why wouldn’t it be a good idea to have a designer and coder make a neat little widget that could be placed on peoples Facebook profiles when they make donations to a cause. This would by far be the cheapest alternative and it is has the ability to spread even faster than the wristbands.

It is true that this is just one option, but you will have to consider your target donators. People will be more than likely to spread things online and get the word out faster than if it was done in the real world. However this is just an opinion and it might not be the best option for everyone.

It goes without saying that everybody that is running a business online should be doing some sort of Social Media for their website and their reputation.  However a lot of companies shy away from the idea of doing a lot of Social Media because it seems like a waste of their time or too labor intensive.

However this is far from the case.  As time goes on it will become more and more important for companies to have a social media presence.  Here is how a Non-Profit should utilize social media.

First things first you need to have a couple different personalities or a main person that will be apart of what is going on in the web world.  So assigning that person would be the first best step.

You want to have a consistent message and if you have 10 people handing the Social Media things can get diluted and/or confusing.

Second off you will want to establish a consistent message on all of the social media platforms.  This would include Twitter and Facebook and Linkedin.  By consistent message I suggest you having backgrounds designed for your Twitter account and a Facebook fan page that is able to get around 100 fans pretty quickly.

The reason that 100 fans is important is because if you have 100 fans you can get a vanity URL.  Vanity URL’s are things like www.facebook.com/yourcharity.

Again now head over to Twitter.com and try to get your name right from the start.  If it is obscure there is a chance that you will be able to scoop it up.  Another thing that is going to work to your advantage is the fact that Twitter has just recently done a major purge of their inactive accounts and your charity might have been taken before, but might not be currently.

Once you have these main two sites setup and you have assigned your person at your organization to handling the issues, it would be wise to go ahead and make sure that you at least have your own name at a number of the other Social Networking sites.  You wouldn’t want any other persons prancing around online as you accepting money when they don’t deserve it.  To do this go to a website called namechk.com and see if your organizations name is available on all of the many other sites out there.

Part two coming soon….

Many of people want to know this exact answer and we are more than excited to answer it.  We have been around for a long time in many different forms and shapes.  We have been in the travel industry for the last 20 years and have nurtured relationships over that time to provide us with substantial discounts on travel.

So what we are able to do is provide vacation packages at no expense to silent auction and live auction holders.  This is how it all works.

1. We send you an adequate number of vacation packages to display at your charity event.

2. Using our bid sheets you let the pricing rise till a winning bid is met at the end of the auction.

3. You take whatever did not sell and place that in the box everything came in with a check for the discounted rate we provided you for the items that did sell.

4. Put it in a UPS dropbox and that is it.  Your company makes a nice sized profit and your donor gets to enjoy a wonderful vacation in an exotic location.

There really isn’t much more to say than what has been said here.  It is the nuts and bolts of how this process works.

I am writing this because some people will not know exactly what we are about and how we can help your charity.  Figured it is needed to get this out of the way as to what it is we do and how we do it.

If you have found this blog post then you are viewing the first post for 2010 with our new updated site.  We have new focuses for this year and want to share it with the world.  We have mostly been steady working away for the longest time, but figured we wanted to get in better touch with our friends and business partners.  Here on this blog we plan on doing just that.

We are going to talk about our packages as well as other things that don’t really have anything to do with our packages.  We want to help the entire fundraising and silent auction community.  We have had a lot of success and in doing so we have met a lot of wonderful people.

From these wonderful people we have learned a great deal of information.  We also tend to do a lot of research and keeping up with the industry.  There is no need to just let this information sit inside ones head.  It is now time to spread the love and spread the knowledge.

Looking forward to meeting you personally online here or at an event around the United States.  This is us getting involved.