Expanding the Drive Through Online Fundraising

The other day I was with a couple of my close friends at a local blood drive in our area. Not only did we give back to our wonderful community but we got a chance to talk with the amazing people who do such a great job over at the American Red Cross. They shared with us how blood drives and other event fundraisers like this are so important to our advancing community. That each and every day blood is needed by some patient somewhere in the world, and many times they never find a match. So very intrigued by this information, me and my friends got to talking and realized that since our community is advancing so quickly with technology maybe our fundraisers and donation events like blood drives should do the same.

We came up with the idea that blood drives and events like this should not only be advertising with little blurbs online but should have entire charity pages set up explicitly for online fundraising. We found it very odd that most events today don’t have donation pages set up for their cause online and they have yet to start online fundraising. And being the technology based community that we are today we thought… “How could they be getting the word out to all of their supporters?” And from the turnout at the blood drive I attended we realized that they’re not. In my own opinion I felt that by posting this event or any other event like it onto the World Wide Web and make an event fundraising page out of it we would help gain more supporters. In the end, this gives the Red Cross and any other important charity that uses online fundraising more donations and a possibility for more blood for those in need.

Raise Money Online

Donating is now easier than ever with the Internet. Traditional forms of fundraising like phone donations, door-to-door requests and mail-in checks are no longer the go-to methods of fundraising. Using the Internet, you can now create your own personal fundraising web page to ask your supporters to donate to.

Now, some may think that this method is not as personal as the others, but creating a personal fundraising page online allows you to showcase your efforts using multiple mediums. These Internet donation pages provide space for information you can write about your cause, pictures and even videos. You can email your personal fundraising page to your friends and family or easily link it to your Twitter and Facebook accounts. Using this method, your reach increases significantly.

Not only can you share your Internet fundraising page with your own friends and family, but you can interact with strangers who support similar causes online by donating to each others causes or teaming up to fundraise together. It’s an amazing tool. I encourage everyone to take the time to set up an online fundraising page. You’ll be surprised with how easy it really is.

Generation - Online Fundraisers

Last week I was asked by a family friend to speak to her 8th grade class about volunteerism and fundraising with a focus on fundraising online. I jumped at the opportunity because I really believe that our upcoming generation is going to be heavily involved in giving back. Technology today has completely changed the way we communicate. It has become such a large part of our lives and will only continue to grow.

I prepared for the session by researching personal fundraising pages, volunteer communities and charity fundraising campaigns online. I wasn’t sure what to expect from a group of 8th graders. There was a good chance they were going to be nodding off in their chairs listening to someone talk about online fundraising and volunteering. To my surprise, when I got there and started mentioning what people are doing right now to give back to the community, they were fascinated.

I discussed how to use the Internet to fundraise and more specifically how to create your own Internet donation pages through sites like Crowdrise. Here, anyone can easily get online and start a personal fundraising page that they could send to their friends and family with the click of a button asking them to donate. This is the perfect tool for their generation and a lot of the students had questions about the site and were enlightened by the idea and how easy it was to donate. Since we were in a computer lab, I spent the last half hour helping them get their online fundraisers set up.

I was really pleased with how everything turned out. I felt like I had actually made some sort of impact on their views on fundraising and, most importantly, I think they understood that one person’s voice really can make a difference.

Internet Café Fundraising

This weekend, I was invited by a good friend to an online fundraiser at an Internet Café to help raise money for various local charities. When I walked in, they had a least 20 computers hooked up, a local band playing some really cool jazz, coffee samplings and lots and lots of hors d’oeuvres. In particular, I must say the lobster mac & cheese was out of this world. I always thought that was such a weird pairing of food and that lobster is too expensive and decadent to be mixed with cheap mac & cheese, but that’s neither here nor there…

The event started out with the charity spokespeople giving their 5 minute spiel about their cause and mission. Then we were directed to their specific charity fundraising campaign online to learn a bit more about it. Fund raising online is super easy to do and even more fun when you have the option to create your own personal fundraising page. The event organizer taught us how to do this so we could create our own page featuring the various local charities to not only donate on our own, but share with family and friends to raise awareness for the causes and hopefully bring in more donations. It was fun to be in the same room as others who are involved with internet fundraising and passionate about it.

After we were done with the online portion of the event, more and more people dropped into the café to see the band. It got pretty crowded in there, so my friends and I left to go see a movie. Overall, great event and great idea to get people together at an Internet café to spread the word about raising money online. And if you’re ever in town, I would suggest you stop by to sample the lobster mac.

Breaking the monotony of the after-work gathering…with event fundraisers.

Yesterday, I decided to go out with my coworkers after work. Usually, we hit up the local bar and vent about the day’s happenings. The typical conversation includes: “{Insert Name} is not doing his/her job, all they ever do is complain” or “I can’t wait until Friday” or “When in the h*# am I going to get a raise?!” Boy - am I sick of that. This time we actually did something good for a change and decided to be a little bit more proactive and actually donate to a charity. The charity we donated to started out as an online fundraiser (which is how we originally found out about it) and then evolved to more of a volunteer program where you donate your homecoming or prom dresses and accessories to girls who might not be able to afford them. Great idea, huh? So we all met up at a local church where the charity fundraising campaign was being held. I come from a family of 3 sisters, so I was super excited to be able to give 7 dresses to the girls that would be there. They also had some event fundraising at the church, so luckily if some girls didn’t have any dresses to donate, they could donate money to the cause. The volunteers working at the church also let us know that were working on getting their web page updated so that they could do more fundraising online. Hopefully that will get them more money and volunteers so that they can market the cause and put on an even bigger event next year.

The event was awesome. All of the high school girls that came were so incredibly excited and grateful for the dresses and to also have their very own personal shoppers helping them for the big day. I heard stories about their boyfriends or guys that they really liked and were hoping would ask them to the dance, that it brought back good (and sometimes really bad) memories of my high school days.

I encourage anyone to participate in this type of event if you have one in your area. Some really easy and fun ways to help even if you can’t volunteer at the actual event is to create an online fundraising pages through a site such as Crowdrise. It’s a great way to raise money online and create your own personal fundraising pages.

So, the night went great and of course, we ended up stopping by a bar afterwards to you guessed it…talk about the work day. I guess you could say we tried not to.