Get Your Chili Cooks Lined Up

Encourage people throughout the community to enter the cook-off. Charge $20 per entry and decide on the award for “best chili”. Promote the event heavily and “spice” things up by arranging to have celebrity cooks. Perhaps a local news anchor or the mayor would enter the contest.

Invite Everyone

The more the merrier, but make sure you have plenty of room.  Plan for a serving line and plenty of space to sit down and eat. Charge a flat fee or $5 for a bowl and spoon and let them eat until the chili is gone.

Add On Fundraisers

Serve up some hotdogs and chips for the kids who may not like chili. Charge accordingly per item.

Hold a bake sale that features corn bread and dessert items to go along with the chili.

Sell a variety of beverages. This is where you will really make your money. People will need something to drink after tasting all that spicy chili so have plenty of cold beverages available, especially beer, soda, and bottled water. 

Hold a 50/50 raffle for those present.

If your organization isn’t equipped to run the add-on fundraisers, enlist the help from other area non-profits. Perhaps each organization would like to participate in return for some of the funds raised.

Make a Day of It

Provide some entertainment to encourage people to stick around. Have a local band play. Set up activities for the kids. Give away door prizes throughout the day. Allow people to make an afternoon or evening of it in support of your organization.

• Make sure your location is big enough to allow people to build their creations.
• Go with the Lego theme and have block shaped appetizers and desserts. Serve drinks that sport the bright Lego colors.
• Hold a building competition – the tallest tower, the best vehicle design, the best holiday display, etc.
• Run a raffle for some Lego prizes. The LEGO Store carries a lot more than just Legos. Think t-shirts, keychains, and clocks in addition to the building sets.
• If you want to create a more specific theme, host a Lego Star Wars or Lego Pirates event.
• Provide plenty of Legos for folks to have fun with. This might involve an investment upfront, but the Legos can be used over and over again if you host other Lego events.
• Charge a ticket price that covers the cost of food, beverages, and supplies, plus leaves 25-50% for profit. Remember, you will also be making money on the raffle.

• No prizes are raffled off, only cash.
• The winner wins half of the proceeds brought in from the sale of the tickets. (eg. If you sell $1500 in raffle tickets, the winner gets $750 and your organization gets to keep $750.)
• Tickets are sold only at the event.
• Decide if the winner must be present to win.
• Set a reasonable ticket price based on your audience. Some events will do better if the tickets are $5 each. Others will greatly benefit if the ticket price is $100. Know your audience and set the price accordingly. People can always purchase more than one ticket if they can afford to.
• Set a specific time for the drawing to occur. This will keep people around at your event and help build the excitement.
• Have multiple people working the crowd to sell tickets leading up to the big drawing. In addition, have one person stationed at a set location so people who want a ticket know where they can get one.
• Periodically, announce over a loudspeaker where the prize jackpot is at. This will encourage others to participate as the jackpot grows.
• If the winner is still in attendance, payout the prize on the spot so you don’t have any follow-up to do.
• Note: Be sure to check with your state agencies regarding raffle licenses before holding any raffle event.

Read how Mountaintop Musicians pulled their event together to benefit Falling Whistles.

When a celebrity teams up with a charity, amazing things can happen. New donors can emerge. New sponsors can appear. Media “buzz” is especially easy to generate. Yes, a celebrity does seem to have that magic touch for generating more of everything.

Would you like a way to reach even more potential donors and sponsors? To have final bids on your celebrity “experience” reach just as high as they can go? Then you need eBay in your fund-raising toolbox.

Many charities have turned to eBay to auction off a celebrity experience or items with much success. Even Oprah Winfrey took her Angel Network auction to eBay earlier this year. Items sold benefited the Angel Network causes. The auction overall raised about $83,000. Items auctioned off included chairs from The Oprah Winfrey Show that sold for $64,000. Clothing items such as one of Oprah’s Chanel sweaters sold for $11,000. Ski gear that was autographed by Oprah sold for $7,600. The power of eBay is clearly strong for charities with celebrity items and experiences up for auction.

Jill Finlayson, author of Fundraising on eBay and former Senior Category Manager, states that celebrity experiences are top sellers on eBay. “Experiences do very well with non-profits. You can do them very large scale with celebrities, or you can do them at a much smaller scale such as San Jose did where you get to turn on the Christmas tree and flip the switch and have that experience, or maybe meet the major,” said Finlayson. Some experiences will have mass appeal, and others will have a real local appeal.

Finlayson encourages not-for-profits to turn to their board members for ideas for experiences to auction off on eBay, often they can come up with terrific, creative ideas. “They may know athletes or people might want to have lunch with them (the board members). Starbucks had a bid to visit the original Starbucks location and a tour and lunch with the chairman. If your board members know people who own or work at companies they if they can get items donated from companies so that people can bid on “get the first one that comes off the line”, even if the item is available in the stores within two weeks, this can be something very valuable. This is the equivalent of going to the theatre on opening night.”

Currently on eBay one popular celebrity charity auction is the Gwen Stefani The Sweet Escape Tour VIP Experience. The winning bidder will get to sit in the front row and meet Gwen after the show. All proceeds from the auction benefit Orangewood Children’s Foundation & Children’s Hospital of Orange County (CHOC). Dates for her April and May 2007 concerts are listed, so there is more than one chance for someone to win. As of this writing bid were in the 2,000 range and are still going on.

Another popular celebrity auction involved many celebrities for the charity Sixdegrees.org. Sixdegrees.org is an organization that celebrities can create an online badge describing the charity that they support and raise money for that charity. Non-celebrities and charities themselves can also create badges to raise money for charities.

Six degrees held a celebrity auction with items from a wide variety of celebrities on eBay including Kevin Bacon, Kyra Sedgwick, Sean “Diddy” Combs, Heather Graham, Tara Reid, Perez Hilton and Elle Fanning. Their auction items were very popular and their website had a link to their eBay auctions so their supporters knew about their eBay auctions.

Whether you are auctioning off a celebrity experience or items, online auctions are a powerful fund-raising tool that can connect you with many potential bidders.

Abigail Beal is a contributor at http://StepbyStepFundraising.com which provides information about a variety of fundraising options from events, to letters, to product sales and more. Visit the website to find out more about The Online Auctions for Charity.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Abigail_Beal
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Coordinate the end of the eBay auction with your live event so that those in attendance can see who the winners are. Schedule all the eBay auctions to end within a few minutes of each other. Encourage people to use their smartphones to bid up the items. Provide a few laptops for those that don’t have smartphones. Project your eBay pages on a large screen so everyone can see the action and final bids.

Produce flyers promoting your eBay items and distribute them to others who may be willing to support your cause but who are unable to attend the live event.

Fund raising is always a fun thing to do. You get to beat your brains to a pulp, hand over all your money to some worthy cause and go home with nothing to show for it but a big thank you. Oh but what a great feeling those thank you’s are. One of the most popular ways of raising funds for that worthy cause is through the running of a tricky tray. A little history of the tricky tray. For starters, they weren’t always called tricky trays. Back in the good old days, they were called Chinese auctions, but in an effort to be politically correct, the term Chinese auction was done away with, at least in most parts of our civilized society. The term tricky tray has been used ever since.

A tricky tray is really nothing more than a massive raffle. Instead of raffling off just one item or even a couple of items, what you’re basically raffling off is a room full of items. Depending on how much stuff you can get your hands you may actually end up with several rooms full. So where does all this stuff come from? That’s the hard part.

The items auctioned off in a tricky tray are basically donated, either from the people running the tricky tray itself or from store owners in their various neighborhoods. Most store owners are pretty cooperative when people come around asking for items to donate, but there are some who clearly place signs in their windows that say, “no donations”. It’s getting harder and harder to run these things all the time.

Once all the items have been acquired, the next step is to set them all up. Presentation is everything and therefore you just don’t throw them on the tables. What you should try to do is arrange the items in a way where they go with each other. In other words, if you’ve gotten a number of donations such as perfumes or stuffed animals, you should try to have them all grouped together. This way, people who are interested in one type of item don’t have to go very far to put in their tickets. Which brings us to how this works.

The system itself is basically very simple. There are companies that make special cards for these types of raffles. A person will buy a card, which might contain about 20 tickets and will then break up the tickets into individuals and throw the individuals into tin cans placed next to each item. After all the tickets have been placed, the drawings begin. One ticket is chosen from each tin can. If you’ve got 300 items to raffle off, this could take quite a few hours. This is why these fund raisers usually include the selling of food during the event.

Tricky trays are great fund raising activities. Even though most of the items aren’t really worth much, people love winning things. It’s the thrill of the chase that makes a tricky tray fund raising gala something to look forward to.

Try running one some time. You won’t be sorry.

Michael Russell Your Independent guide to Fund Raising

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Michael_Russell

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• Secure a location.  A beach, park or a school will work great!
• Decide on a list of rules.  For instance, is it against your rules to throw at a persons face, or are you still out even if you catch the ball…
• Decide what to charge as an entrance fee.  You can charge as a team, or as individuals.  Individuals may be easiest because if you play as a team, you will need to provide each team member of the winning team with a prize.
• Ask local business owners if they would be willing to donate a gift card or merchandise for the winner(s) in exchange for free “advertising”.
• Consider selling concessions as an added way to earn money. Solicit donations for a bake sale, or rent a popcorn machine.
• Advertise!  This can be a lot of fun, so make sure to capitalize on that fact!

• Ask your employer if they will host a PJ Day for a good cause.
• Charge a fee to wear PJ’s (and support your cause) on a casual Friday.  Consider a fee such as $20 per person
• Make a sign for the lobby of your office to be displayed on the chosen day.  This way any clients/customers will be aware of the fundraiser.  Make sure to have a change jar available in case anyone feels led to contribute to your cause.
• Make sure to write a thank you note to your employer on behalf of your group!

How to Hold a Bachelor/Bachelorette Raffle Fundraiser