Community Fundraising for New Village Hall

[Troy2552]

Have you been involved recently with fundraising for a new village hall in your community? Have you any ideas or advice to share particularly the wording of any written requests to business for donations etc! Hope to hear from you!

[naomi24]

We've practically re-built our village hall on the proceeds of fundraising. We've held all sorts of events, including car boot sales, quiz nights, Burns Nights, St George's Day celebrations, Whist Drives, Coffee Mornings, etc, etc.

Have you tried applying for National Lottery funding? I know of some village halls that have been helped by the National Lottery. Information here:

http://www.lotteryfunding.org.uk/

If you want to apply to businesses for donations, you might find you don't get much support, but in the first instance speak to business people who live in your village. They may be more inclined to help than outsiders would be.

If you are going to write to other businesses, make the letter friendly, short and to the point. Explain briefly what you want to do, and how this will benefit the community as a whole. Don't write a long letter - very few take the trouble to read long letters from people they don't know - especially if they're asking for donations. Don't hold your breath for a positive response from them though. Like us, you may find the only way to do it is by organising fundraising events.

Good luck.

[warspen]

if is small business you would proberly be better off asking them personally for a gift donation for a raffle think this would give you more success than asking for cash in this current climate

[mickeymiller]

First of all, congrats on getting your group started! Taking the first steps of forming a group can always be a trying process... kudos for giving it a go!

One of the first things can really help getting started is finding ways to get organized early on. Coming up with the tools to manage your members, plan your events and get the word out about everything you do can be tricky.

I'd say the best way to get a jump on this: set up a group home page on a fundraising website. Many of them are free to use and can offer new groups amazing tools to organize, find new volunteers and raise awareness for a cause (regardless of whether you actually want to fundraise). Some require that you have non-profit status to form a group, but plenty others will give student groups, church groups and other groups without non-profit status some awesome ways to help get your group off the ground.

For example, one good site to help new groups is GroupSpaces (www.groupspaces.com). They offer plenty of tools to help get groups off the ground, including some event management functions that let you create events, as well as managing your members. And if you're interested in fundraising for your group eventually, they can link to your account and charge 2.5% of donations received (while some other sites charge as much as 5%).

Another good option would be Empowered.org (www.empowered.org). It is a bit newer than GroupSpaces and their platform is geared more towards social action, but are open to all small groups, regardless of non-profit status. Also, they offer plenty of solid tools to help new groups, and give groups the ability to create specific volunteer activities and events for each group (which GroupSpaces doesn't do). And if you ever were interested in fundraising, they offer specific fundraising campaigns (and charge 1.5% of donations) - nice if you ever go down that road.

There are some other sites worth looking into - Mee