Simple Fundraising Tips and Tricks for Beginners

Fundraising plays a vital role in the way we support causes for public interest, health advances, and various charities. If you want to help a charity or cause that’s important to you, you’ll need to know how to fundraise effectively. Thankfully, that’s not too difficult.

To prove it, here are a few simple fundraising tips and tricks for beginners. Follow them, and you’ll be raising money to support your cause before you know it!

Establish a Fundraising Goal

As you begin your fundraising efforts, set some time aside to think about how much you can realistically raise for your cause. Take into consideration factors like the setting. For example, will you be raising money on a college campus, through an organization, with a large scale event, or with an online campaign?

You’ll also need to think about the visibility of your cause. Is it something that people are already familiar with? If it’s a cause that’s not familiar to the average person, your fundraising efforts are going to be a little more difficult, which means you should probably temper your expectations. Don’t move on with the rest of the planning process until you’ve established a preliminary financial goal.

Organize a Fun Event

One of the best ways to build interest in your cause and fundraising efforts is to plan a fun event that people will look forward to. Popular options like 5k runs are easy to organize and execute. Think about the location, the sign-up and registration process, and other potential factors such as food and beverage vendors, and volunteer recruitment.

Find a weekend during the year when there isn’t going to be a large number of other events on the calendar. Avoiding holiday weekends and other festivals will put your event in a good position to draw the largest possible number of attendees. Of course, the more attendees you have, the more tickets you’re going to sell — and that means more registration fees and donations that you’re going to be able to contribute to your cause!

Sell Customized Merchandise

You can increase the amount of donations you collect at your event by selling merchandise like custom fundraiser t shirts. Custom commemorative apparel is an effective way to extend the visibility for your cause beyond the day of the event. And if you plan on hosting the fundraiser as an annual event in upcoming years, ordering t-shirts can help generate community interest over long time periods.

Build Visibility for Your Cause

If you want to build visibility for your cause, one of the best ways in recent years has been through popular web-based crowd-sourcing tools that allow benevolent Internet users to donate to causes they resonate with. Some of the more popular crowd-sourcing sites include IndieGoGo, GoFundMe, and Kickstarter.

Thanks to the power of social media, society is donating more than ever before. The #ALSBucketChallenge was one of the most famous examples; it was wildly successful, bringing in more than $115 million during the summer of 2014. Thanks to a simple hashtag, ALS research supporters were able to see the rapid and tangible spread of support across networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Fundraising isn’t rocket science. It just requires a little effort and the generous support of socially-conscious individuals that want to make a difference.

Photo Credit: Mike AW