Kick Butt Business Idea #4

Pitch your event to the non-profit organization

Selling the charity on your fund raising event should be the easiest part of your task. You can offer to do all the work yourself and they would only need to lend their name to the event. Or, they may be willing (or even insist) that they have one or two of their volunteers on hand to make sure everything runs smoothly and that the interests of the charity are being protected.

You need to listen to their needs and be as flexible as possible. It is absolutely crucial to your success that the charity is happy. Above all be honest and up-front about what you are doing. Let them know both what they will get out of the event and what you will get out of it (i.e.: prospects for your Special Event Letters to Children business.) One successful event will lead to many more in the future.

You will need to set a price for the Holiday Letters and let the charity know how much they will receive. I suggest a price of $5.00 per letter because this is a small amount that most people will have on hand as they are shopping.

The absolute best option is to give the charity 100% of the proceeds. However, this will mean that you will have to go out-of-pocket to pay for postage and material costs of sending the letters. The next best option is to offer the charity 100% of the profits. This way you can take out the cost of sending the letters. Whatever you do make it absolutely clear up front how much the charity will make per letter.

If you are working this from the 100% profit angle this means you will need to know how much it costs you to create and mail each letter. Since you will also be sending a separate follow-up letter to the parents advertising the Special Event Letters package you will want to consider the cost of this follow-up letter as well. At the very most I would not recommend allocating more than $1.00 per letter for expenses. This gives the charity a very attractive 80% of the proceeds and allows you to recoup your expenses.

Find a suitable high traffic Location to set up your Fund Raising Event.

The task of finding a high traffic location is made much easier by the fact that you have associated yourself with a worthwhile charity. Approach a merchant with the idea of selling Letters from Santa from his store and you will no doubt be turned away 9 out of 10 times. But, add that you are raising money for "Make a Wish" or "Special Olympics" and you immediately gain their willingness to help out.

Which merchants should you approach? You want a location with lots of walk through traffic. Inside a mall would be ideal. Or, right outside a busy grocery store. Or, even a children's restaurant - such as Chucky Cheese.

You'll need to call up the manager of the mall, grocery store, etc and tell them what you would like to do. It also would not hurt to tell them that you will be mentioning their store in the press release that you will be sending to the media. Free publicity is always a good thing.

Your event needs to be held on a weekend. Saturday is best but you might also try to get permission to run the event for the entire weekend. If your event is to be held outside you need to figure out what to do in case of rain. Can you set up inside instead? Can you reschedule for a different weekend?

After you get a firm date send a letter to the manager and your charity contact confirming the time, date and other details. You want to make absolutely sure that everyone is clear about when the event will be held.