How to Promote a Fundraiser

Promoting a fundraiser is a fruitful opportunity for a charitable organization, allowing the group's cause to shine through. Promotions also improve public opinion of the organization overall, if done well, thus ensuring future donations. According to the Grassroots Fundraising Journal article "The Nuts and Bolts of Organizing Great Special Events" by Laurie Earp, promoting a fundraiser begins with planning. The fundraiser needs to be planned step by step from the beginning, far before the promotional process begins. Plan the fundraiser as a whole first. Then delegate specific tasks like fundraising to team members.

Instructions

1. Put someone in charge of public relations/community outreach. Promoting the event may essentially become a full-time job in the days approaching and the day of the fundraiser. Having one person around who has planned the publicity and knows how everything fits together amidst the chaos of setting up, greeting important donors and talking the press can definitely make things easy for frantic volunteers.

2. Maximize the publicity and make it work for your campaign. If your organization has a strategic plan, which is essentially a timeline of goals, put all aspects of the fundraiser into the strategic plan. Time the promotions so that the hype doesn't fade the week before the event. Make sure people know about it in time, however. Make sure the person in charge of promotions knows specific promotional goals.

3. Get the local news media involved. Put the event on the community bulletin board, if your local station has one. Alert your local television news channel that reporters are welcome to attend the event.

4. Attract journalists to the fundraiser by having reputable people speak on the topic at hand. If your fundraiser is for heart disease, for instance, make sure journalists know a cardiologist will be speaking at your fundraising event about the future of heart disease research.

5. Use online media resources. If the organization has its own website, put a news bulletin about the fundraiser on the front page. If the organization does not have a domain name, simply create a free account with an online social networking site, such as Facebook or Myspace. Social networking sites let you invite people to join your group or RSVP to your event online. This can be more efficient than simply putting a web address on a poster or flyer and hoping people visit the site.

6. Prepare group members beforehand to talk to the press about the event. More importantly, prepare everyone to deal with such information as: the key mission of the group, how the event connects with the mission of the group and where the organization plans to go in the future. Be sure to thank everyone who participated in the fundraiser publicly.

7. Remind people who have given their contact information to the organization's fundraising committee of the event in the preceding days. Especially if people gave an RSVP early on in the promotional process, they might simply forget, no matter how well-intentioned they are. According to Earp, reminding attendees and volunteers is of utmost importance to the fundraising event.

References

• Grassroots Fundraising Journal: The Nuts and Bolts of Organizing Great Special Events