How to Solicit Book Donations

One of the more successful fundraising ventures for non-profit organizations is the book sale. You can attract a variety of buyers with a book sale: parents looking for inexpensive books for their kids, collectors seeking a rare volume or simply one missing from their collection, avid readers who hope to stock up on mystery fiction late and then there are always the cookbook enthusiasts. The great thing about selling books is that you can amass an inventory fairly easily as long as you start well ahead of the time of your sale. Don’t forget that once you begin accumulating all these books, you’ll need a nice dry place to store them.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

1. Get permission, as early as three months ahead of time. to place brightly colored attention-getting announcements in grocery stores, dry cleaners, pharmacies and other neighborhood establishment. These announcements should prominently state the cause in whose name you are holding the sale along with the dates and location of the sale. For example: Help Us Raise Money For (Name of Charity) Donate Your Used Books: All Kinds Accepted. We’ll Pick Up! Call (phone number). Sponsored by (name of your organization.

2. Check into thrift stores. They usually sell books fairly inexpensively, but every so often they become overloaded and need to get rid of some of their stock. Here’s where you come in. Several months before the sale, contact the store manager and ask if they might be thinning out their stock of books and if so, you would be glad to “recycle” them to make money for your charity.

3. Stop at every garage and estate sale you see, armed with copies of your announcements. At the end of many of these sales, items are packed off to the Salvation Army or Goodwill, so there’s a good chance that these great leftovers can be yours.

4. Ask schools for help; they may be able to help in a couple of ways. First, you might contact a parent group to help you sponsor a contest among the classes to see which grade can collect the most books simply by bringing outgrown books from home. Another possibility is that textbooks and sometimes library books need to be replaced—and your group could be the recipient of those. Ask your school librarian and the school district curriculum director.

5. Solicit donations at your workplace (and the workplaces of everyone in your group). Start a competition among departments.