Sergio gives fund raising advice

Sergio recently went over seas.

He is very keen to help others in important development work overseas and kindly produced some excellent advice on fund raising:

Let me start by saying that, no matter how daunting the prospect of fundraising might seem, once you get started it gets easier and easier, to the point where you’ll really enjoy doing it. Once it is all over, you will look back and consider this stage an integral part of your volunteering project.

My partner and I are originally from Spain, where the concept of individuals fundraising for their own cause/charity is virtually non-existent. So you can imagine how we faced the prospect of “having to ask for money”. Even so more considering we were only two and a half months away from starting our stay in Cambodia, and both of us worked full time. “But, hey, even if it is a few quid, it’ll help” we thought. In the end, out of our £5.400 target we managed, in 2 months, to raise… over £7.600!! Never in our wildest dreams could we’ve dreamt such a response…

How did we do it?

Let me start from the basics. After attending a fundraising workshop and reading a couple of books on the subject, my absolute top two tips would be the following:

· Be ready to tell everyone: network, network, network!!
· Base your fundraising events on things you enjoy / your hobbies.
Taking into account these premises, what follows is a set of more or less random thoughts and ideas for fundraising based on our experience.

1) THE BLOG.

First thing, set up a blog, you don’t need any specific web design knowledge for this (I started from scratch, didn’t actually have a clue of what a blog was before giving it a go). However, it pays to spend sometime thinking of the layout and the information you want to include, and to experiment with different add-ons and widgets (a portable chunk of code that can be copy-pasted and executed by you, the end user). It took me a good three weeks before I was happy with the result. Once this is done, the blog is a very easy way of conveying your message, it can become quite interactive and adding/removing information is relatively simple.

The blog serves 3 purposes:

· Before leaving, it helps raising awareness and supports your fundraising efforts.
· During the project, it allows you to stay in touch with friends, family & sponsors back at home, hence also showing that you are delivering on your promises. Keep the blog up-to-date, with a couple of postings a week and lots of pics (internet connectivity in Cambodia was awful, so if we managed, anyone can!) For the photographs, we used links from the blog to picasa web albums. I’d recommend that people take an old laptop with them to their host countries – this way, you can write the postings at your leisure, and leave the laptop to upload them alongside the pics at the cyber-café while you savour the local delicacies!

Picasa web albums: http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/
Google Documents: http://docs.google.com/

· When you come back, the information on your blog will help you putting together a presentation with the highlights of your experience. You can then deliver this presentation to friends, family or institutions (Rotary, Lions Club, Round Table, Women’s International…) to thank them for their donations/support, and maybe raise further funds.

Tips for your blog

· Think of a catchy name that people can remember and associate with you. In our case, we named it “ESC-APE!!” which stood for “Elena & Sergio in Cambodia – A Project’s Experiences!!” It just so happens that “to escape” is the same word and has the same meaning in English and in Spanish: “to remove oneself from a familiar environment”.

· Start populating the blog with a section explaining the who, when, what and how. You can do this as a PowerPoint presentation, upload it through Google Documents and then embed it into the blog.

· We imported a widget to show photographs of ourselves, and another to leave a recorded a voice message- all this helped to make the blog more personal, especially towards people who didn’t know us.

· Create a block with links to past and future fundraising events.

· Be clear about the target amount you want raise, what it is for and what will cover. Show your progress: a simple “fundraising thermometer” updated every couple of days is a very visual and effective way of doing this.

· Include a widget that offers the possibility of subscribing to the blog by email or RSS. This way, people will receive one email per day with links to updates / new postings (and only one per day; no postings/ updates, no email)

· We had a “donate directly” through PayPal widget, but I don’t think anyone used it. Most people would transfer money directly into our account, or give it to us in cash.

· It helps if you have a friend who can design a nice banner for the blog’s main header (the first thing visitors to your blog will see!)

· Include a link to your blog in the signature block of all your email accounts, and your social networks.

For our blog, we used “blogger” (formerly known as “blogspot”):
https://www.blogger.com/start

Blog ESC-APE!!: http://elena-sergio-in-cambodia.blogspot.com/


2) THE EMAIL ACCOUNT.

It helps a lot keeping separate your private email from your “project’s” email, especially if you are going to ask professional institutions / business for sponsorship.

Hence open a specific email account for your project – keep it consistent with your blog’s name/theme.


3) THE BUSINESS CARDS.

Get some business cards printed, and hand them out to everyone!! I can’t stress this enough… EVERYONE!! Include your name, email address, blog address and, if you want, your mobile/phone number.

Keep some of them to hand out in your host country.

You can get 250 business cards for free from VistaPrint (you pay only for postage and processing and any product upgrades you select)

VistaPrint : http://www.vistaprint.co.uk/


4) THE LEAFLETS.

Produce a simple leaflet briefly describing the who, what, how, when. Include your contact and bank details. You can then hand them out at your fundraising events / presentations.

5) FUNDRAISING EVENTS.

· As said above, sit down and brainstorm for half an hour about things you enjoy doing, your hobbies: Sports? Dancing? Walking? Photography? Cinema?... Then try to link them together. “Can I organize a sponsored walk, take some photos and then hire a room somewhere to exhibit them, sell them, have a raffle and maybe a wine tasting event?”

· On your list, don’t forget to organize events where people get something in return for their money. It is OK for you to train and run a10km race, but it is much better to have a salsa night.

· Keep up-to-date records of the amounts fundraised (a simple spreadsheet would do) – the more transparent you can be about it, the more people will trust you.

· Use the media! Go to your local newspaper, explain your project, hand them out your business card and your leaflets and ask them to write an article about you.

· You can always have a raffle, anywhere! Go to your local corner-shops, explain your project, hand them out your business card and your leaflets and ask them to contribute with something: a bottle of wine, some cheese, a pair of socks… Tell them you’ll be publicising their business in the upcoming article that the local newspaper is going to write about you, and at the raffle itself.

· Talk to people, explain your project, hand them out your business card and your leaflets… (spot a recurring theme here?). You’ll be surprised how imaginative people can be, and the amount of useful advice they could give, usually from the most unexpected individuals!. Most of our fundraising ideas where shaped by contributions from others. For example, since we play squash, we thought of organizing a squash competition. When we discussed the idea with the board of our local squash club (after handing them out our business cards and leaflets) they agreed to let us use two courts on a Saturday free of charge. Not only that, but they suggested that rather than a competition, we organized a “24 hr squash marathon”: have 2 courts for 12 hours, divide the time into 15min slots, at £2 per slot and person. This way, more players could take part and we wouldn’t have to buy prizes!!

5) FUNDRAISING WHEN YOU COME BACK.

As mentioned above, once you are back from your project it might be worth contacting some of the local institutions that sponsored you and ask them if they’d be interested in a presentation about your project at their monthly meeting. This is a nice way of thanking them, as you can show where they contribution has gone.

But you should also target institutions that haven’t sponsored you. We, for example, delivered a presentation about our experiences to our local Rotary Club, just with the intention of raising awareness. Two days later we received from them a £500 cheque in the post, which we donated to the NGO we worked for in Cambodia.

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Hope this helps!!

Good luck with your fundraising.

If you have any queries, don’t hesitate to ask. I’m only one email away!!

Kind regards,

Sergio Gallego-Schmid
sergio.gallego.schmid@gmail.com

Do contact Sergio for further help and advice.

Thank you Sergio!