Fundraisers

[Fyrebugg41]

Anyone have any ideas for easy profiting fundraisers? Besides BINGO! Any ideas would be appreciated.

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~*That's why we're here, to help those in need, we're not here for money, fame, or greed..To help those fellow friends, who can't help themselves..We're volunteers because we care, because we want to help, to help others who are in need, not for ourselves*~

[pfpchief]

we run a hoagie sale each month we buy the lunchmeat,cheese rolls and produce. we make them sat morn. and sell them by riding around through the town. we also sell flowers easter and mothers day. we also send a letter to everyone in our town asking for donations.

[Fyrebugg41]

Those aren't bad ideas. Do you make a good profit off of those? Cuz i wonder if they'd end up costing more, or the same to buy all the supplies rather than sell them. And we've recently talked about the letter thing.

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~*That's why we're here, to help those in need, we're not here for money, fame, or greed..To help those fellow friends, who can't help themselves..We're volunteers because we care, because we want to help, to help others who are in need, not for ourselves*~

[medic1001]

newest idea that I heard:

"A month (or 2 weeks, whatever) without cooking"

go to local restaurants, try to get them to donate a gift certificate that will cover dinner. Raffle them off for about $3. People will invest 3 bucks for the chance to get 30 free meals.

All is costs is time and printing of the tickets. The restaurants get a free ad by getting their name on every ticket.

[WTFD730]

Every year we hold a Coin Card fundraiser. A coin card is a small folder that has slots for quarters to be placed in them to equal a $5.00 donation when full. The coin cards also have a small envolope attached to the back of them for if the resident would like to write a check or place currency in them, most residents write a check for more than the $5.00 requested. We deliver a coin card to every home in our district with a letter explaining what the money will be used for, and we will leave the cards with the residents for 3 weeks to fill the cards. After 3 weeks we will go out and pick up the cards. We have about 1,200 homes in our district, we raised about $5,500 this year and allowed us to purchase integrated PASS alarms for all our MSA SCBA,s. If you would like further info on this Email me.

[This message has been edited by WTFD730 (edited May 16, 2000).]

[Firekatz04]

We have a couple of "major" fundraisers. First, we have a calander fundraiser based on the state lottery. We recieve a "donation" for $15.00 per calander and we print 1000 calanders. We run a "bi-annual" pancake breakfast... one on Palm Sunday, one on the 2nd Sunday in Oct. (Fire Prevention week). We get donations of food and we make out OK.

[N2DFire]

A lot of different agencies in my area have used this same fund raiser. My vollie RS tried it for the first time last year and when all was said and done, we CLEARED over $15K. Not too bad for a little leg work and one VERY full Saturday.

O.K. Folks - stay with me on this one - it's hard to explain clearly at first & could get confusing.

The basic premis is you are having a raffle/lottery with several prizes (all cash), now it gets confusing.

You have 100 tickets - you sell 99 of them before the night of the event at a cost of $100/ticket. (I know it sounds steep but no one around here has ever had problems selling tickets. A word of caution to those that would halve the price & double the number of tickets sold - keep your eye on the number of people you will then have to feed and the catering cost.)

The night of the drawing you admit 2 persons/ticket for a catered meal & open bar*

All thru the night you sell $1 chances on the 100th ticket. This ticket will NOT be added to the drawing until only 9 others remain (Translation - the winner of the 100th ticket lottery automaticly has a 1 in 10 chance of being the big winner).

The Drawing process:
You can use what ever suits you - we have a caller w/ a ping pong ball system. Each ticket sold is numbered 1 to 99. That number coresponds to a numbered ping pong ball.
The drawing goes something like this (Modify to suit your taste):

First ball drawn - $100
20th - $100
40th - $100
50th - $200
60th - $100
80th - $100
90th - $500
99th - $1000
100th - $5000

There are also to things called Side Boards. They are boards with cards numbered 1 to 100. You sell 1 ticket per number ($5/ticket on one board and $10/ticket on the other). The way these work is the buyer can pick from any (remaining) number they want. The winner is the person who has the number cooresponding to the last ball drawn. The prize is normaly half the take from the board.

Normaly at these affairs - money flows (fairly) freely so any other fund raising things you wish to mix with it fair pretty well. (We do a second 50/50 raffle @ $2/ticket)


Anyone who thinks they might like to try this (or wants to get a better understanding of how it works) please e-mail me and I'll be happy to explain this in more (hopefully clearer) detail.

*Omit open bar if you have issues w/ serving alcohol. Non alcoholic beverages are available all night long. We do not open the bar till the meal is served and close it at least 1 hour prior to ending for the night. There are several other agencies in my area that do this same fund raiser and to date we have not had a single alcohol related problem.


[This message has been edited by N2DFire (edited May 18, 2000).]

[bob1350]

Our department is fortunate in that we don't have to raise money every year. We have gone door to door in the past and raised seed money for the State Convention we host every ten years.
However, our brothers and sisters on the Canyon dept. up the hill have an annual auction. Bar-B-Q, beer, live music, plus the auction. It's held at a campground, so you don't have to worry about driving home. They get all the items for the auction donated: T-shirts, home made furniture, gift certs, fire collectables,etc. You get the idea. The dept. has had this auction for years. They really don't need to do it any more, but since everyone has such a great time, they continue the tradition. My wife and I had so much fun(or was that beer?) last year, we spent $400.00!!

[WOODMAN]

We also used to do the coin card thing but as in most things in a vollie department and was getting hard to get guys to go out snd collect the darn things,so we contracted with a firm to send out letters for us looking for funds and the response was less returns but the returns where for more money then the coin cards and we did better in the long run.I should add that we got the disc form the direct mail firm and we now update our own records and do our own mailings saving us about $1200.00 in costs.

Tom

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