- The hospice
- Get involved
- Donate
- Events
- Blog
- FAQ
- Shop
- Press
- Venue Hire
Whether you are a regular fundraiser or if this is your fist time, we have some useful tips in this guide to help you along and make your event a success.
What’s your goal?Make sure you set yourself a goal, both personal and for the fundraising amount too. Try to be realistic but be brave as well and think big! Plan and write everything down and involve as many people as you can, if asked most people are willing to lend a hand to support you. Your colleagues will all have different skills, so try to make the best of their knowledge to make the fundraising easier.
Explain to your supporters why you are raising funds. You can find information about the hospice on our website or we can send you literature. The more details and information you can give your supporters, the more passionate you appear and this will help you to reach your fundraising target.
There are lots of events that we organise ourselves as well as overseas challenges. Most of these events require sponsorship. Ask your friends and families to support you and then think about all the different people you know – don’t be worried about asking people to support you, most will be impressed you’re making an effort – don’t forget to tell them why you’re doing it! Raising sponsorship can be hard if you do a lot of events but try to think outside the box. Try to raise the money by other means, you could have a clear out and have a ‘car boot’ sale, arrange a pub quiz down your local or get baking and sell the cakes at work!
Please remember to always ask your sponsors to Gift Aid their donation, if they are UK tax payers. This means that we can receive an extra 25p for every £1 donated. It doesn’t cost your sponsors any extra and we won’t put their details onto our database – but we will need their full name, home address and postcode to be able to claim the Gift Aid on their donation. Use our own sponsor form or if designing your own then please make sure you ask for this information and include a Gift Aid box that they tick to give us permission to make this claim.
Gift Aid can be claimed on voluntary donations from individuals (not company donations). It can’t be claimed against sales of tickets or the proceeds of a general collection.
A lot of companies have budgets for matching their employees’ fundraising efforts, find out if your employer does this, if not, be brave and ask if they would be prepared to support you.
Make the most of all your work contacts, such as suppliers and clients. If you know them well, they may well sponsor you through their company.
We want you to have fun and keep things as simple as possible when doing your fundraising. To put our minds at rest and to stop you accidentally breaking any laws, please read the important stuff below. Check out www.how2fundraise.org which has lots of external advice to ensure everything you are doing is legal.
We’d love to hear what you’re planning and we can post information about your event or fundraising on our blog to let others know. After the event make sure you send us a photo with information on how things went. Keep up to date information on Facebook and Twitter – let everybody know how hard you’re working to support Rainbows!
