This is a great fundraiser, not only because people will appreciate being offered a helpful service instead of just being asked for donations, but also because it can easily be carried out in people’s free time.  It would be great for a hospice, church, PTA or high school.  Advertising this fundraiser to other members and supporters of these organizations should prove easy and effective.

This fundraiser can take one of two forms (or you can offer both services, of course):

You can offer to transfer people’s family videos in VHS format to DVDs. A lot of families have family videos in VHS format, which is harder to play and far less stable than DVD format.  Transferring between the two formats is very easy.  All you need is a machine that specifically makes this conversion possible. Professional versions of VHS to DVD converters are fairly expensive, so we recommend renting one or convincing a store to let your organization borrow their VHS to DVD converter.  That said, there are far cheaper ways to convert VHS tapes to DVDs, two of which are demonstrated in the videos at the end of this post.

You can offer to digitize family photos. Many families have boxes of developed family photos from before digital cameras became popular.  If a printed photo is destroyed and the original film is not available, the photo is gone forever.  A digital photo, of course, cannot really be destroyed – only deleted.  You can even offer to produce multiple copies of the same DVD of photos for a fee so that the DVDs can be sent to the customer’s relatives.  All you need to convert printed photos into digital photos is a scanner.

The technically savvy can even offer to convert a family’s VHS family videos into a format that allows them to be added to the photo DVDs.  Imagine going from unusable and unstable VHS family videos and piles of developed family photos to just a few copies of family memory photo and video DVDs.  We think it would be easy to find customers among a high school’s parents, a PTA, a church congregation or elsewhere.

For a quick overview of how to convert from VHS to DVD format using a digital camcorder, see below:

To get a basic idea of how you can convert from VHS to DVD using a VHS player and a separate DVD burner (as opposed to an all-in-one machine as described above), watch the following:

These two videos are meant only to serve as primers. There are plenty of more detailed tutorials on the web for those who decide that this easy fundraiser is for them.

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