How to Organize a Calendar Fundraiser for Success

If you’ve ever heard of a calendar fundraiser, you know that they can be powerful organizational fundraisers.

What’s an organization changing fundraiser to you? Is it a few hundred dollars? A few thousand? Tens of thousands?

These goals aren’t just realistic, they’re 100% achievable with a digital calendar fundraiser. Through a combination of platform tools available to use for free in digital calendar fundraisers, tips and tricks on how to utilize those, and help from your organizers you can do it.

The Basics - Setup and Invitations

The actual process of getting a digital calendar fundraiser going with Teamfi is quite easy. 

1. Go through a quick demos with one of our founders to get familiarized with the product.
2. Spend 10 minutes inputting a cover photo for your campaign, fundraiser goals, and inviting your participants.
3. Encourage your participants to hit that 20 contact goal once in the platform (more on this below).
4. Activate your fundraiser and let Teamfi do the work!

Those are the four simple steps for every calendar that will set you up for success. Beyond that though, there are a number of additional free Teamfi features at your disposal that will help your fundraiser hit its potential.

Contacts - Management and Ensuring Participation

One of the most important aspects of running a digital calendar fundraiser is ensuring that your organization's reach is maximized. The more potential donors that your can put your calendar pages in front of, the more successful your calendar will be. With Teamfi, this process can be even easier than sharing your calendar fundraiser on social media (Teamfi has built-in sharing tools for this, though) because of the platform's built-in automatic text messaging outreach.

With this feature, participants just add the contacts of their potential supporters and Teamfi handles the rest. Our golden rule of advice? Try to have every one of your participants add 20 contacts. If you do that, your calendar fundraiser will all but certainly be a success. Not every participant will always reach 20 contacts added, but its a great goal to maxmize your fundraiser's reach.

The best part? From your fundraiser organizer dashboard you can view and monitor the whole process, ensuring that your participants are working hard to include potential donors for their individual calendars.

Group Features - Incentivizing Competition

If you’re had fundraisers with a large group, you know just how difficult it can be to track how everyone is doing.

Imagine you’re a wrestling program and you invite not just your high school wrestlers, but your youth wrestlers as well just as Lowell High School Wrestling in Lowell, Michigan did in one of our spotlight fundraisers last spring.

With Teamfi’s dynamic groups feature on fundraisers, you can group out your high schoolers and middle schoolers and see who is raising more. Additionally, you could group by grade or you can group participants by specific teams within a larger organization – like multiple teams in a youth football organization, or by classrooms in a elementary school fundraiser. The possibilities are endless and it’s completely customizable to your specific fundraiser's use-case.

Telling Your Story in the "About This Fundraiser" Field- An Example

In your calendar fundraiser's organization page is a place you can put your group’s story. Here you can explain what you’re fundraising for and make a personal pitch to any potential donors that land on your donation pages fromthe automatic outreach, social media, or otherwise.

The Zeus Swim Team out of Norwalk, CT, utilized this spot to not only explain what they’re fundraising for, but explain exactly how it works and provide some incentive to fill their calendars. Guess what? They crushed it with their fundraiser.

Here's exactly what Zeus wrote in their "About this fundraiser": 

“The Zeus Splash for Cash Calendar is BACK! And we have some big prizes up for grabs! Help support the Mezzanine Makeover!

Every dollar raised goes towards improving your swimmer's experience. We have high hopes and dreams to raise funds for:

• Updated mezzanine for Dry Lands practice

Swimmer Challenge:

Swimmers will receive a ‘personalized link’ to sign up for Teamfi. Once you've signed up, you can send out your link to friends, family, and neighbors to complete your calendar by securing donations for each date. Swimmers who complete the entire calendar will be entered into a special raffle with exclusive prizes:

1st Place: $500 Amazon Gift Card

2nd Place: $200 Swim Outlet Gift Card

3rd Place: $100 Amazon Gift Card

4th Place: Private swim lesson with a coach

DONORS: Every dollar donated earns the donor an entry into a grand prize drawing – a $500 cash reward

AND, new this year, the Squad that completes the most calendars will win a Pizza or Ice Cream Party with bragging rights for the year!

How It Works:

• ‍A personal link will be sent to each swimmer via text/ email! Click here to see what it looks like
• Each donor picks a number on the calendar, pledges that amount to the swimmer. For example, if a donor chooses dates 1 and 28, they pledge a total of $29 to the swimmer.
• Payment will be completed by Credit Card.
• IF YOU'D LIKE TO MAKE A CASH/CHECK DONATION, make it out to: "Norwalk Aquatic Club" and give it to your swimmer!
• If a date is already taken - That’s okay, you can still add a custom donation below to pledge ANY amount to your swimmer!
• Donors can sponsor multiple dates.

Every dollar donated earns the donor an entry into a grand prize drawing – a $500 cash reward!

Important Dates:

Calendars and donations are due by December 6th.

The grand prize drawing will take place at our Winter Holiday Party!

This fundraiser is a wonderful way to support our team while also offering our swimmers the chance to score some great prizes!"

The end result for such a clear and captivating "About this Fundraiser" section on your donation pages? A successful fundraiser to effectively communicates your organization's intent, goals, and incentives.

Outreach to Potential Donors

When it comes to donor outreach, we handle a lot of that for you. Seriously, Teamfi automates outreach to your fundraiser's contacts over the course of your campaign.

In addition to the built-in automation tools, any organization who are fundraising can greatly improve their chances of success by using their own tools to help with outreach.

Sharing your group's calendar to social media is a huge part of that, that's why Teamfi has built-in 1-click social media sharing for your calendar pages. By pairing the automated outreach with social sharing, your calendar fundraiser is certain to maximize its potential.

As a bonus, your group can even pre-promote your fundraiser through social media, giving participants the time to let their friends and family members know of the campaign head of time and budget for any potential contributions.

Time to Run the Best Calendar Fundraiser Ever

A well organized and efficiently run calendar fundraiser isn’t complicated, it just requires a clear plan and the right tools. When you focus on strong setup, high quality participation, smart use of grouping features, and consistent outreach, your fundraiser can reach levels you may not have thought possible. With these strategies in place, your next calendar fundraiser has everything it needs to generate real momentum for your program and create meaningful results for your athletes.

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