Top tips on promoting your event
Word of mouth
Don't underestimate the power of word of mouth - it's the ultimate marketing tool. Tell
your friends, family and colleagues about your fundraising and get them to spread the
word.
Get creative
Unleash your creative side and use Oxfam's branding to really make your posters and
flyers stand out. Use our customisable poster maker.
Use your local media
Read our guide to writing a great press release and take a look at our sample.
Contact your local paper explaining what you're up to. You can also contact your local
radio stations to push for a plug on air. Check out our radio interview tips and if you're
feeling really ambitious, why not approach your local TV news teams to see if they'll
cover your story? Just don't let your new-found fame go to your head!
Use social media
Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are brilliant tools when it comes
to promoting a fundraising event - check out our social media guide for some helpful
tips. Use all the contacts in your email address book and encourage online friends to
share your event with others.
Get sponsored by a local business
Asking a local business to sponsor you is a great way to advertise your event and keep
your costs down. Try and talk to the manager in person or over the phone as opposed
to in an email or letter.
Promote the cause
This is crucial. If people know the inspiration behind your fundraising and the difference
their donation makes, they'll be much more likely to support you. See the difference
every donation makes.
A picture says a thousand words
Use photos throughout your publicity to personalise your event and attract more
attention. Make sure someone is lined up to take snaps on the day of your fundraiser
too - this will be a big help when it comes to collecting donations. Download our tips for
taking a great photo at your event.
Why do people raise money for charity?
1. They want to support a particular charity
The number one reason for online fundraising is to support a particular charity close to
the fundraiser’s heart: they know who they want to raise money for and they are
motivated to do it.
2. They are inspired by a person or people
Whether it be a parent, child, friend, colleague or family member, a personal connection
drives people to fundraise. Fundraising in memory is a big part of this motivating factor
as well – people fundraise to honour someone they loved.
3. To support a cause
People care deeply about their personal passions and look for charities that support
their causes. It’s not just about the charity itself – the underlying cause is what really
drives people.
4. To feel good
Helping others, making a difference, and getting fit motivates fundraisers too.
5. To take part in an event
Running a marathon, skydiving for the first time, or cycling the Alps is a great personal
challenge. And if fundraisers can raise money for charity while they’re at it, even better.
There are lots of other motivations behind fundraising as well, including wanting to
support local concerns, being part of a corporate group and for religious reasons.
So what does this mean for your organisation?
Firstly, remember that your supporters make great fundraisers. Encourage your
committed donors to take on a fundraising challenge or event and ask them to get the
message out there, such as why your charity means so much to them.
Also, think about your fundraising messaging. Remember, people don’t only fundraise
because they want to participate in the event: highlight your cause and how good
fundraising feels.
A PUBLIC DISCUSSION MADE BY DAN PALLOTA
The real social innovation I want to talk about involves charity. I want to talk about how
the things we've been taught to think about giving and about charity and about the
nonprofit sector, are actually undermining the causes we love. But before I do that, I
want to ask if we even believe that the nonprofit sector has any serious role to play in
changing the world. A lot of people say now that business will lift up the developing
economies, and social business will take care of the rest. And I do believe that business
will move the great mass of humanity forward. But it always leaves behind that 10
percent or more that is most disadvantaged or unlucky. And social business needs
markets,and there are some issues for which you just can't develop the kind of money
measures that you need for a market. I sit on the board of a center for the
developmentally disabled, and these people want laughter and compassion and they
want love. How do you monetize that? And that's where the nonprofit sector and
philanthropy come in. Philanthropy is the market for love. It is the market for all those
people for whom there is no other market coming. And so if we really want, like
Buckminster Fuller said, a world that works for everyone, with no one and nothing left
out, then the nonprofit sector has to be a serious part of the conversation. But it doesn't
seem to be working. Why have homeless charities not come close to ending
homelessness in any major city? Why has poverty remained stuck at 12 percent of the
U.S. population for 40 years? And the answer is, these social problems are massive in
scale, our organizations are tiny up against them, and we have a belief system that
keeps them tiny. We have two rulebooks. We have one for the nonprofit sector, and one
for the rest of the economic world. It's an apartheid, and it discriminates against the
nonprofit sector in five different areas, the first being compensation. So in the for-profit
sector, the more value you produce, the more money you can make. But we don't like
nonprofits to use money to incentivize people to produce more in social service.We do
no have a good reaction to the idea that anyone would make very much money helping
other people. Interestingly, we don't have a bad reaction to the notion that people
would make a lot of money not helping other people. You know, you want to make 50
million dollarsselling violent video games to kids, go for it. We'll put you on the cover of
Wired magazine. But you want to make half a million dollars trying to cure kids of
malaria, and you are not considered an important person. we don't realize that this
system has a powerful side effect, which is: It gives a really stark, mutually exclusive
choice between doing very well for yourself and your family or doing good for the
world, to the brightest minds coming out of our best universities, and sends tens of
thousands of people who could make a huge difference in the nonprofit
sector, marching every year directly into the for-profit sector because they're not willing
to make that kind of lifelong economic sacrifice.
The second area of discrimination is advertising and marketing. So we tell the for-profit
sector, "Spend, spend, spend on advertising, until the last dollar no longer produces a
penny of value." But we don't like to see our donations spent on advertising in
charity. Our attitude is, "Well, look, if you can get the advertising donated, I'm okay with
that. But I don't want my donation spent on advertising, I want it go to the needy." As if
the money invested in advertising could not bring in dramatically greater sums of
money to serve the needy. If we can have that kind of generosity -- a generosity of
thought -- then the non-profit sector can play a massive role in changing the world for all
those citizens most desperately in need of it to change. And if that can be our
generation's enduring legacy -- that we took responsibility for the thinking that had been
handed down to us, that we revisited it, we revised it, and we reinvented the whole way
humanity thinks about changing things, forever, for everyone –that would be a real
social innovation.
18:27
