Selecting The Right FundraiserPosted by Nick Niesen on November 8th, 2010 Selecting the right fundraiser is the most important decision you?ll make. Among the key factors are the timing of your fundraisers each year, the quality of the merchandise, selling considerations, delivery considerations, and ultimately, the net profit to your organization. Think of yourself as running a small business building a reputation for innovation and quality products. What are your financial goals versus expected unit volume numbers, sales revenue versus profit percentage, quality of goods versus cost, acceptable market price points, etc? First choose a type of fundraiser 1 - Event-based fundraisers The first decisions you have to make are on the fundraiser category, selecting a fundraising company or distributor as your supplier, and then the actual fundraiser itself. Decision factors You can design a simple survey that you can give to past organizers and other key influencers such as local merchants and organizational leaders. Offer clear choices to ease evaluation of replies. Print it out and get quality feedback from within and without your organization on what?s worked well before and what needs improving. Then, put together a spreadsheet for evaluating and ranking fundraisers. Break the ranking criteria into categories with sub headings in text boxes across the spreadsheet. Numerical rankings should be assigned to what criteria are most important to your group at this particular time for this fundraiser. Things to consider when evaluating offerings: 1.Quality of the merchandise items offered Seek wisdom from past experience Successful past fundraising ideas could and should be repeated, but remember that your customer base is often close to eighty percent the same customers from year to year. Spice it up; try something new and different that will increase your revenue. Like it? Share it!More by this author |