Though Fundraiser-Ideas.net generally publishes one comprehensive description of a fundraising idea at a time, we know that many people are looking for ways to integrate their passion for art with their fundraising efforts and thus we decided to post a long list of art fundraising ideas. Most of these ideas would be great as elementary school fundraisers or as preschool fundraisers, but they can be adapted for other settings, of course.
One of the most common art fundraisers involves having students create their best works of art and then having images of those pieces of art transferred onto items that parents and relatives of students can buy. There are many types of items that can be customized with student art, including plates, clocks, blankets, stamps (that you can actually use to send letters) and Christmas ornaments. There are two items that particularly stand out for fundraising purposes:
Custom t-shirts, which we’ve written about before (click the link to see that post).
Custom postcards and stationary. Creating custom postcards and stationary with student art would make a great fall fundraiser, as many parents would love to transform their child’s art into attractive holiday cards that they can send to family and friends.
The best part about raising money by transferring student art onto different types of merchandise is that these items can be created after you gauge demand for them, which means that you only have to order as many items as you know you can sell. As for finding suppliers, there are many companies that you can find via Google that customize items.
Though transferring student art onto merchandise might be the easiest and one of the most profitable art fundraising ideas, here are a number of other fundraising ideas involving art that your group can successfully carry out:
Art Class/Preschool Keepsakes: In the same vein as the examples above, you could easily have books printed (again, there are many companies that can be found online that offer such printing services) which contain a photograph of the best piece of art produced by each student in the class. Many parents would buy this as a keepsake.
Community Mural: You could start a community mural project in which members of the community each paint a portion of the mural. To raise money with this idea, you could charge people to participate in the event, auction the mural when it has been completed or both.
Live Art Auction: You could have high school students create pieces of art to be included in a live auction.
Teach an Art Class: If you and your group members cannot teach a drawing or painting class, try to convince the high school art teacher or a local artist to lead a class.
Gallery Opening: Host a student gallery opening with a 50-50 raffle. You could also turn the gallery opening into a silent auction fundraiser by auctioning off the art.
Parent and Child Art Classes: While you could host art classes focused on learning specific skills and taught by experts as suggested above, you could also host parent and child art classes in which the focus is on parents and children working together to create a piece of art.
Paint a Van: We have seen this work very well as a creativechurch fundraiser, but it could be an excellent fundraiser for other organizations as well (particularly in an elementary school setting). Basically, find someone who owns a large white van (ideally a white van that belongs to a member of your group) and allow kids to paint the van with washable paint for a fee. Make sure participants know that the owner of the van will continue to drive the van with the paint on it for a certain amount of time.
Family Portraits: Recruit a talented student photographer or painter to create and sell family portraits in support of your group.
Etsy.com:Etsy.com is a wonderful website for selling crafts. You could have each of the members of your group produce a few items to be sold on Etsy.
Host a Film Screening: You could host a screening for film art your group has produced and charge an entry fee.
Art Supply Store Shopping Event: Work with an art supply store to have the store offer a special discount during a particular time (certain hours on a particular day). It would be your job to get as many people to shop at the store during this time as possible. For every customer that shops during this time and brings your group’s flyer announcing the event or shops during this time and mentions your group, your group would receive a portion of the value of their sale. Everybody wins; the art supply store gets increased business due to your promotional efforts, the customer gets a discount (due to the store’s discount for your group during the specific time period); and your group receives a portion of the purchases.
Create and Sell Custom “Art Yearbooks”: At the beginning of the school year, ask parents if they would like a photo album of all of their preschooler’s or elementary school student’s artwork over the course of the year. Of course, this is a lot of extra work for the teacher, so you would have to price the art scrapbooks appropriately. Essentially, for an appropriately high price, the preschool teacher or a PTA volunteer would take a picture of every piece of art a particular student produces over the course the year and then assemble those photos into a scrapbook that would be delivered at the end of the year.
“Children at Play” Photos: This art fundraiser would best be carried out by high school photography students after getting permission to photograph elementary school students playing at recess. Have photography students or your group’s best photographer take photos of school children during class and recess (again, with the school’s permission, of course). Later, display the photos either online or at a school event, so that parents can see the photos you’ve taken and can order professionally developed copies of the photos they like. Note that this fundraiser can be modified such that instead of selling photos, you sell paintings. The fundraiser would operate in largely the same way, but instead of having parents select photos of their children that they would like, they select photos of their children that they would like to have turned into paintings.
Tie-Dye Station: Kids love to tie-dye. If you have white t-shirts, smocks and tie-dye supplies set up during a town fair, you can raise quite a bit of money for your cause.
Caricature Station: Recruit someone who can draw well to sketch fun caricatures at a town fair for a fee.
Other fundraising ideas that we’ve written about that could easily be adapted to become art fundraising events:
Depending on the level of art knowledge within your group, you could host an art trivia night fundraiser.
A film art group could raise money by converting home movies from VHS to DVD format.
This event might be slightly controversial, but it can also be quite fun. A beautiful baby contest is a fundraiser in which photographs of babies are displayed in a public place (for instance, a supermarket) and voters are asked to vote with dollars. At the end of the fundraiser, the money goes to the designated cause and the baby whose donation jar contains the most dollars (“votes”) is awarded the title of your town’s most beautiful baby. If you need a way to get parents to enter their kids, consider offering a baby-related prize for the winner. This prize can be donated by a baby store.
You do not only need to hold this competition in a single location; you can have photos displayed in multiple locations including preschools, supermarkets, baby clothing stores, etc. and simply total the money collected from all locations at the end of the event. You might be able to entice some of these retailers to participate (particularly baby stores) by explaining that some people will hear about the beautiful baby contest and choose to visit their store versus a competitor’s store in order to have the opportunity to shop and view and vote in the contest. When trying to get parents to include their babies in the beautiful baby contest, be sure to advertise for entrants at baby clothing stores.
Leading up to and during the contest, be sure to get the local news involved.
Additionally, this idea can be adapted for high schools. Instead of being a beautiful baby contest, you could host a Ridiculous Photo Contest in which participants produce the most absurd photo of themselves to be displayed. Every dollar would still count as a vote.
A spaghetti dinner fundraiser is a classic fundraiser, but it is classic for a reason: It’s remarkably easy and it is a near sure-fire money-maker. Better yet, it is so simple to organize and execute that it can easily become a recurring fundraiser (and who doesn’t like recurring income?). For those who are unfamiliar with how to run a successful spaghetti dinner fundraiser, don’t worry, there’s not much to know.
Basically, all you have to do is announce to your group members (or members of the local community through advertising) that you’re going to hold a spaghetti dinner fundraiser, estimate the number of people attending and buy enough supplies, recruit volunteers to help prepare the dinner and then start cooking. It’s that simple. Of course, as we always do, we recommend that you consult local authorities before hosting your fundraiser to make sure your event complies with all laws and regulations. In this case, your community might prohibit the sale of food without a restaurant license, for instance.
There are many reasons why spaghetti dinner fundraisers are so popular.
After you run a spaghetti dinner, you’ll have a very good estimate of what your next dinner should cost – and everyone likes a fundraiser that has costs that are easy-to-estimate.
Your supporters can integrate your organization’s spaghetti dinner fundraisers into their families’ routines so that a spaghetti dinner fundraiser can become a successful recurring fundraiser for your organization, such as a recurring monthly event.
Simplicity. As mentioned, a fundraiser like this is so simple to pull off.
People always love to receive something for their participation in a fundraiser (even if they only “receive” a good experience), as opposed to simply being asked to donate to a cause. In this case, not only do they receive a nice dinner with friends for a good price, but they don’t have to cook or cleanup for a night.
Of course, it is quite easy to “spice up” a spaghetti dinner fundraiser by offering a different menu. We’ve written about one such possibility so far, an exotic meat barbecue.
To see a great overview of how one organization, the Lourdes Catholic Church, prepares for their massive spaghetti dinner fundraiser, view the video below:
This is not a fundraising idea, but it is likely that it will be useful to many individuals and organizations that actively fundraise. In addition to serving as a source of contact information, business cards (especially when free), can serve as a promotional tool for your fundraising events.
First, let us just underscore that this is not a gimmick. The company and specific offer for free business cards we’re about to recommend is entirely legitimate. It is possible to receive 250 free business cards and just pay $3-4 in shipping and handling. We’ve ordered free business cards for promotional purposes from Vista Print plenty of times and we’ve never had an issue.
Any group interested in fundraising is naturally interested in saving money as well (or should be). Thus, we introduce Vista Print, a stationary company with a huge web presence that allows individuals and organizations to order free business cards. The only catch is that you are limited to a number of designs and the free business cards have the Vista Print web address on the back unless you opt to remove it for a fee (Vista Print offers free business cards with the hope that you will buy other Vista Print products and the idea that you’ll hand out your free business cards and others will visit the VistaPrint.com link on the back).
Free business cards are perfect for small groups and non-profit organizations, as it is always good to get your organization’s contact information into as many hands as possible, as you never know what can happen when information about your organization is floating around — someone can pass your card off to a lawyer who is willing to do pro bono work, a potential donor or someone who is willing to partner with your organization or volunteer. The bottom line: Business cards are extremely cheap when you consider how much they can bring your organization (and cheapest, of course, when they’re free business cards). To get started with Vista Print, click here and then click on “Free Products” and then “Free Business Cards” on the left-hand side.
Free Business Cards as a Promotional Tool for Fundraising Events
When business cards cost $20 for 250 or 500, it’s hard to justify just handing them out to strangers in a public setting, as most cards will be thrown away. However, when they’re free, the range of promotional options using business cards grows quite a bit. You can promote your fundraising events by handing out free business cards with your organization’s and/or event’s information on them to people in a public setting (make sure this is permitted in your location). We recommend a town or county fair. Unlike a flyer which takes up space, people are likely to shove a business card in their pocket or purse (as opposed to just throwing it out), which increases the likelihood that they’ll find it again later. To increase the effectiveness of promoting a fundraising event with free business cards, you could try the following: You can hand out cards that automatically enter people into a free raffle. All you would have to do is write a number on the back of each card and something along the lines of “You’ve just been entered into a free raffle. Come to Pete’s Pizza at 5:00PM to see if you are the winner of a brand new television!” That’d be a great way to get people to a fundraising event being held at Pete’s Pizza at the same time, even if the event is as simple as Pizza for Charity, in which the restaurant donates a portion of its revenue from their dinner shift that evening to your organization.
Finally, one good thing to have on your business cards is a website. If your organization (and ideally all of your major fundraising events) does not currently have a website, there is a free solution: Dev Hub, a free web-based site creator that is no more difficult to use than an email is to edit. We’ve written about how you can easily build a free website for your organization and/or fundraising events and we encourage you to check out that post by clicking the “free website” link.
This is a fundraising idea we should have covered a long time ago, as it is the perfect add-on to so many of the fundraising ideas we’ve covered so far.
A 50-50 raffle is the most basic of raffles. All you do is sell tickets to the raffle, combine the money and award 50% of the combined money to the person who holds the winning ticket and 50% of the money to your organization. A 50-50 raffle takes next to no planning and you don’t even need to buy prizes ahead of time. If it sounds extremely simple, that’s because it is.
There are plenty of events at which you could hold a 50-50 raffle to increase your fundraiser’s profits. We’ve covered some specific ones before:
Finally, a quick cautionary note: It is possible that a 50-50 raffle might not be permitted in your area due to gambling laws. Please make sure this is not the case before adding a 50-50 raffle to your fundraising repertoire.
A dunk tank is a remarkably easy fundraiser, particularly when it comes to school fundraising. For those who are unfamiliar, a dunk tank is a large tank of water with a plank or bench overtop for a person to sit. That person is dropped in the water when another person throws a ball and hits a target, causing the plank to separate into two pieces. You can see an example of a successful dunk tank fundraiser in the video below.
A dunk tank fundraiser is best executed not as a standalone event, but in addition to an outdoor community event, such as a town fair or a school’s field day. To raise money, simply charge a fee to throw balls at the target (three balls for $5, for instance). Also, a dunk tank fundraiser is likely to attract a large crowd, so be sure to sell tickets for a 50-50 raffle as well (a raffle in which the winner receives 50% of the money collected and your organization receives the other 50%). Don’t forget to make sure that it is legal to hold this type of raffle in your area beforehand. When you’re ready to begin your dunk tank fundraiser, simply search for dunk tank rental companies online. There are lots!
Who should you get to be dunked?
Try to convince the mayor and local celebrities (radio personalities, local news personalities, etc.) to volunteer to be dunked. In a school setting, be sure to ask the principal, the vice principal, the gym teacher and well-liked teachers to participate. The captains of school sports teams might be good choices as well.
For a video of a successful dunk tank fundraiser for cancer on the Ellen DeGeneres Show, see below:
A common fundraiser in the UK, abseiling (called rappelling in the United States) is a great way to raise money for an organization. For those who are unfamiliar, abseiling involves lowering yourself down the side of a building or down a cliff with climbing equipment. It’s basically the fun part of mountain climbing. It can be an excellent fundraiser because people are motivated to participate by a sense of adventure (and the desire for that sense of adventure is often enough to motivate participants to aggressively seek people to sponsor them). There are also some people who will use a charity abseil as a rather bold way of overcoming a fear of heights and many people will donate to help them do so.
For many reasons (legal, insurance, safety, etc.), a charity abseil isn’t an event to undertake without the guidance of an established company that specializes in hosting abseiling events. You can easily find a reputable abseil company by searching online.
It’s worth noting that, for our non-UK readers who might still be asking themselves what it means to “abseil,” this charity fundraiser might be far more difficult to pull off in your country. For instance, in America (where this post was written), it is likely that it is nearly impossible to get permission to run a charity abseil off the side of a building as depicted in the video below. You may, however, still be able to successfully pull off a charity abseil on the side of a cliff.
For a great overview of a successful charity abseil, watch this video:
