Fundraising for Community Groups

By Peter Thomson

Fundraising has always been a major source of income for many organisations like community groups, sporting clubs, and the Parents and Friends (or Parents and Citizens) Associations of schools. With restricted financial help from governments, many of these establishments wouldn't be financially viable without the wonderful and tireless fundraising exploits of their members. For example sporting clubs charge membership fees but with expenses ever growing, it would not be possible for them to exist financially without fundraising.

The types of fundraising opportunities these days are many and varied. There's a plethora of fundraising entities about trying to entice organisations to utilize their services. From selling bottled water, wrist bands, homewares, clothing, jewelry and show bags to horse back riding, shopping tours and engraving bricks and pavers. The selections are truly amazing and seemingly endless.

Schools and sporting clubs have traditionally stuck by the period honoured ways of fundraising by selling donuts, lollies, chocolates and biscuits. Over old few years, although, due to child obesity issues from poor eating characteristics and beneath working out, most of these conventional fundraising products have started to fall out of favour with fundraising entities.

This has allowed the less traditional fundraising ideas to get a foot in the door so to speak of this multi-million dollar industry.

So where do you become when you want to get rolling with fundraising? Say for example your child is in their second year of school, and you have chosen to become more actively engaged in the comings and goings of their school. You attend the first P and C Association meeting of the year, and you end up on the Fundraising Committee for the year. You like to impress your peers; you would like to make a difference and do the job successfully.

There are many factors why the school might have to fundraise. It might need funds for some extra computers in the library, or new playground equipment or perhaps they would like to see a roof over an innovative walkway. What to do, where to get going to raise the required funds? These days most people are turning to the internet.

The internet has in a very short space of time become the most popular and powerful tool for locating info, much more widely used now than the local newspapers or the yellow pages. When searching for ideas or information, most people now don't consider any options other than the internet. There are many search engines for sale to the internet user, such as Yahoo!, Bing, Altavista, Ask and Lycos. But by far the most popular search engine on the internet is Google.

ComScore is a marketing study company that provides marketing information and services to many of the internet's largest businesses. According to estimates released by comScore at the finish of 2008, Google ended the year with 63.5 percent market share of all search queries performed in the U.S that year! That's a large slice of the pie.

Google provide a Keyword Tool, which allows access to information regarding the most popular search phrases used by internet users when searching on Google. The hottest search terms used for Google for fundraising are in point of fact fundraising, fundraiser, school fundraising ideas, fundraiser ideas, ideas for fundraising, fundraisers and fundraising ideas.

The upshot from all of these searches show a wide variety of sites that the user can access, the majority of them being fundraising directories that list many hundreds of fundraising entities offering their services.< - 32383

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