Fundraising Ideas

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

The sorts of fundraising opportunities these days are many and varied. There’s a plethora of fundraising entities around going to try and entice organisations to utilize their services. From selling bottled water, wrist bands, homewares, clothing, jewelry and show bags to equine riding, shopping tours and engraving bricks and pavers. The options are truly amazing and seemingly endless.

Schools and sporting clubs have traditionally stuck by the time honoured techniques of fundraising by selling donuts, lollies, chocolates and biscuits. Over the past few years, nevertheless, due to child obesity issues from poor eating characteristics and below exercising, many of these established fundraising products have started to fall out of favour with fundraising entities.

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

So where do you turn to when you wish to get moving with fundraising? Say for example your child is in their second year of school, and you have chosen to grow more actively involved 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 wish to impress your peers; you want to do something positive for the environment and do the job successfully.

There are many reasons why the school may need to fundraise. It might need funds for quite a few extra computers in the library, or new playground equipment or perhaps they would like to see a roof over a fresh walkway. What to do, where to get started to raise the required funds? Today most people are turning to the internet.

The internet has in a very short space of time become the hottest and powerful tool for locating details, far more widely used now than the local newspapers or the yellow pages. When searching for ideas or details, most people now don’t think about any options apart from 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 hottest search engine online is Google.

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

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

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

One of the best websites in these search results appears to be goldstar.net.au which is the web address for the Brisbane based company Gold Star Gifts and Stationery. This company supplies novelty stationery and gift items to schools, clubs and organisations Australia wide for fundraising purposes. They provide free delivery, no upfront costs, and the fundraising entity keeps 50% profit from the sales of their products. So if you’re looking for fundraising, fundraising ideas or ideas for fundraising, check out Goldstar today.