Archive for November 4th, 2009

Fundraising for Community Organisations

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 help from governments, nearly all of these establishments wouldn’t be financially viable without the tremendous and tireless fundraising exploits of their members. For example sporting clubs charge membership fees but with expenses ever growing, it would not be potential for them to exist financially without fundraising.

The kinds of fundraising opportunities these days are many and varied. There is a plethora of fundraising entities out there trying to entice organisations to use 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 choices are truly amazing and seemingly endless.

Schools and sporting clubs have traditionally stuck by the period 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 habits and under physical workouts, most of these established fundraising products have started to fall from favour with fundraising entities.

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

So where do you turn to when you wish to get going with fundraising? Say for instance your child is in their second year of school, and you have chosen to grow 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 would like to impress your peers; you would like 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 a few extra computers in the library, or new playground equipment or possibly they would love to see a roof over a new walkway. What to do, where to get rolling 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 hottest and powerful tool for locating details, far more widely used now than the local newspapers or the yellow pages. When looking for ideas or facts, most people now do not think about any options other than the internet. There are many search engines available to the internet user, like Yahoo!, Bing, Altavista, Ask and Lycos. But by far the most popular search engine on the internet is Google.

ComScore is a marketing research company that provides marketing data and services to most of the internet’s largest businesses. According to estimates discharged 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 is a big slice of the pie.

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

The results from all of these searches show a broad variety of sites that the user can access, most of them being fundraising directories that list many hundreds of 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 fundraisers, check out Goldstar today.

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