Fundraising Update

Well, it has been a long time since I've updated this blog. Our fundraising slowed a bit over the summer, plus I had a lot of personal things going on and never got around to updating our blog.

So here's our update!

After the success of our first two movies nights, we decided to hold two additional movie nights.... that didn't fare so well. The third movie we decided to show was Jurassic Park. We thought it'd be a huge hit, but it turns out that many parents didn't want their children to see it. For our last movie, we showed a more family friendly movie Night at the Museum, but the turn out was not so great either.

I think movie nights as fundraisers have huge potential, but location is key. We live in a small town that has been saturated with our fundraisers. Plus, I have to admit, although we did put an announcement in the local paper, we didn't advertise as well as we should have done. I do encourage, however, other groups to consider movie nights if they're fundraising because it is a lot of fun and the potential to raise money is there.

Also, we found that we made a little more money when we sold hot dogs and nachos in addition to popcorn and candy.

A few weeks ago we had another garage sale and raised over $1100!! One of the keys to our garage sale success is that we kept all of our garage sale leftovers from the previous sale in church storage. That, plus new donations, meant that we had a huge selection of things to sale. We also decided that Fall garage sales tend to better than Spring.

Our last fundraiser (we think) is scheduled for this Saturday, November 14. We're holding our 2nd bake sale and we're doing a raffle as well. This is turning out to be a GREAT fundraiser!

We have three prizes to give away:

1. A Wilson NFL football autographed by Emmitt Smith of the Dallas Cowboys
2. An iPod Touch (16 gb)
3. A Nintendo Wii

Truthfully, if you have someone in your group who is good at soliciting, you can probably get prize donations for free. I'm terrible at that, so we ended up buying the prizes ourself and we're just considering it a donation to the cause. The football (which sells for around $350) was autographed by Emmitt Smith for free because India's Hope (Sarah's Covenant Homes U.S. parent organization) is a nonprofit and we were able to show nonprofit status in our request.

Thank you Emmitt Smith for autographing our ball for free!

We had 750 tickets printed online (ticketprinting.com) for $36. We're selling the tickets for $5 each or 5 for $20. We've been advertising via facebook and blogs and several members of our church have been selling tickets at work. So far, we've raised over $1000!! Never underestimate the power of good hearted blog readers!

One family who is in the midst of raising money for an adoption bought $200 worth of tickets. Another family who is going through a personal crisis gave $100 and a single mother with 4 children gave $60. Thank you!

We will also be selling tickets at the bake sale and drawing the winners at the end of the sale. I hope I'll be able to report that all our tickets were sold!

And, finally, I wanted to say that our fundraising efforts allowed us to buy 3 tickets to India AND donate $1000 to help Sarah buy new beds for the new children that she's about to take in at Sarah's Covenant Homes. Praise God! I want to mention, though, that the biggest help for our fundraising efforts has been church members designating their tithing funds to the mission trip fund. Without church financial support we never would have gotten as far as we have. Thank you Cornerstone Church members!

Until next time!