Just thought I start a thread on club fundraising. I thought it may be some help to some people, and I am always looking for new ideas myself if you wish to come back to me.
A quick back ground about my club.
The club was founded in 1879, the land and ground's were given to the people of the village by the local landowner. When the landowner emigrated he put the land in trust with the local council, until 2008 when the 99 year lease expired. The council has now decided to charge us rent for the use of the land which means the operating costs of the club are around £6000 - £7000 a year, (minimum). That might not sound allot but as an amateur club, which basically only operates for 6 months it still takes some finding.
After a bit of a scare with our our previous chairman nearly ending up going to court about non payment of rent it was decided to form a fundraising committee with the sole purpose of bringing in the money in order to keep the club afloat.
Having just come back from a year overseas I decided to give it ago. Well I was more or less pushed into doing it.
Unlike a number of other clubs we have no wealthy benefactors who are happy to plough money in, so I needed to come up with new ways to bring money in.
My first though was to approach local businesses for sponsorship, offering different packages depending on how much they were prepared to give.
Banners, website adverts, match ball sponsorship, shirt sponsorship etc etc.
I managed to get a local hotel to give us £250 a year, for which we give them an advert in our handbook, website, a banner down at the ground and also hold our end of season presentation dinner at the hotel.
Shirt Sponsorship, each season we have a new playing shirt. I managed to get a good deal from a well know sportswear supplier making custom made shirts, in our club colors, with a badge embroidered for £11.50. I then sold the front, back and sleeves of the shirt as advertising space to local business to have there logos placed on them. for example, £750 for the front, £300 for both sleeves and £300 for the back.
Each shirt was then sold to players for £15, a bargain if you ask me, including there own name and squad number printed on. I also managed to get this done for free with some free advertising. Try going to your local cricket shop and buy a cricket shirt for less than20 never mind with printing and embroidery.
One of the best things we have found over the last few ears has been a weekly meat tray. Especially over the summer because of BBQ season. A local butchers donates a really nice meat tray for every home game. This is then raffled and raised around £35-£70 a week depending on the numbers of people at the ground. As you can imagine over the season this brings in a nice little sum.
As a thank you for this again, we have a advertising banner at the ground, an advert on our website and club handbook and we also give them free tickets to our dinner. Everyone is happy and it all helps the club.
Bag packs at local supermarkets. Speak to the local Asda, Morrison's, Tesco's etc and ask if you can bring the juniors down to pack shoppers bags for them. It's a great way to bring in a few thousand if you do it a couple of times. You'll just need a few volunteers to supervise the kids.
Advertising Banners, I spoke to a number of businesses and offered them a banner. The cost of which was incorporated in the price. i.e if the banner cost £50, sell that to a business for £150 for the year then the following year a reduced rate of £100 was offered on a year by year basis.
Hundred club, basically you get someone to get 100 people to give you a pound every week. You can do this for the whole year or just the cricket season. I would suggest just the cricket season. Each week a draw is made, the 3 numbers draw win, £25, £15 & £10. £50 then goes to the club each week. If your not up to date the prize money goes back to the club. We've been running this for around 3 years now and its another good fundraiser.
Standing order schemes, you set this up to run for the entire yea at a set value. At our club we pay, cricket subs, social fees. This costs £70 so the bare minimum is £5.83 per month. Well if you are going to pay that you may as well round this figure off and the rest becomes a donation to the club. You can also add other things to this like kit, tickets to club/league dinners etc and it means the club has a steady stream of money coming in each month. Also stops the yearly moan when you ask players to part with cash.
I've found the best way is to build relationships with people and a you help me and this is how i can help approach seems to really work.
This year we are going to try raffling a years sponsorship with a cricket brand, a chili cookoff competition and a progressive dinner.
I'll write more about those later if anyone is interested but my fingers hurt now so I'm going to wrap up.
I hope this doesn't come across as teaching people how to suck eggs as i don't wish it to sound like that but i certainly could have done with some ideas about how to do this 4 years ago.
Hope someone finds this useful.
Cheers
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Topic: Club Fundraising (Read 24820 times)