I hope that everyone found my fundraising presentation as a good jumping off point to see who we’d like to reach out to for fundraising. The fundraising group is Raven, and myself, and I hope that this presentation put it into some clear and defined terms so we can see what steps we need to take to get the funds that we need.
So as we all know, we want to start an Indiegogo which is like Kickstarter but we get to keep the money for our cause even if we don’t reach our goal, which is great. But we want to reach our goal! Also, Fundraising doesn’t mean that we only need to get monetary donations that would go to the Doe Fund – we can also get people and organizations to donate items or even their time or services to us, which will help us when it comes to raffling off prizes or giving people incentive to donate to our Indiegogo. Hopefully we can go live with our Indiegogo as soon as Penelope Lawson puts the final touches on the fundraising video.
There are three areas that we need to raise funds for, monetarily through indiegogo or otherwise:
Number 1) The Doe Fund
Number 2) Our big event that Emily, Caroline and Tim are working on.
Number 3) CURA itself
Although we will not be able to obtain the tax exempt form from The Doe Fund or Fordham (not likely), we need to simply go about our outreach to potential donors with complete honesty. Our credibility as a publication through Fordham University should be very helpful.
For Doe, the Event, and CURA itself, we need to work three different angles on how we approach companies or people; each one needs to be a little different.
The Doe Fund: We want to raise money for the Doe Fund, which is what our mission with raising any funds was in the first place. A lot of home and building places would be great to reach out to if we talk about how we’re trying to benefit the Doe Fund, and how Doe gives right back to the community. We’re trying to find out the locations of some organizations where the Doe Fund workers clean up around, and we think that if we reach out and tell them, for example. what a great job they do in the area where one of Target’s retail stores is located, we can give them incentive to give back to Doe. Raven also suggested that we find places that would be willing to give a voucher for a free lesson or service that we can give to Doe, such as a free photography course.
Fundraising for the event: I’m sure the event group has brainstormed a lot for ideas and we’re hoping to work together, come up with a template for a letter and reach out to many people to help fund our event. We thought a lot about getting sponsorship through smaller, NY based companies, especially food and beverage, or even larger companies that can send us merchandise to raffle off and go towards our larger indiegogo goal. Fundraising can also come in the form of a band or singer playing a free show and bringing more people in, having a music festival give us tickets to raffle off, or even getting a DJ to play for free to promote themselves, but that’s up to the event group. Very importantly, through the event, we can even possibly find a sponsor to match whatever we raise overall, which would be the amazing boost in fundraising. For example, we can get someone like Lowes or Sears to match whatever we raise during our Wix Lounge event – if we can make it to an amazing $5,000 that’s instantly $10,000 for the Doe Fund.
CURA: Lastly, we need to think of fundraising for CURA, even if it’s not going directly to Doe, it will help sell our magazine. We can reach out to publisher to send us books to raffle off. Even cooler would be if we can get a publisher to agree to make X amount of beautiful special edition magazines we can give them out as a donation incentive. We also think it would be worth it to reach out to other groups that would be down with CURA’s mission of bringing together art and action. A lot of these brands are what we thought that people that would support our magazine’s mission and might be willing to send raffle
stuff or money our way.
Raven and I are working on emails, and also come up with creative ways to reach out besides just doing a huge email blast. Please let me know if you think a tabling on the plaza might be a good idea. Any suggestions at all would be great. Thank you!
- Rana Ayhan