Raising Money for Charity Events? Try These Creative Ways to Get More Sponsors

In the current economic climate, when everyone is watching their pennies, people raising money for charity events need to be more creative. In more prosperous times, it was easy to find sponsors for a particular charity event, at present; you need to use your imagination to tease them out of the woodwork. There is no denying the fact that the World Wide Web has opened up whole new areas for anybody who is looking for sponsorship, even the Queen has her own Face book page – no doubt updated by a palace operative. Probably the best way to begin raising money for a charity event in the current climate is to make use of this free publicity.

Try Face book
One way of letting people know that you are trying to raise money for a good cause is to set up a Face book page for each new event. Face book gives you the chance to broadcast your news to an audience of millions as you can update what is going on through the news feed. Anyone who is interested in sponsoring charity events will be able to see what you have put on the page and decide whether they are interested enough to donate some of their hard earned money.
Most people like hearing about what is going on in their particular neighbourhood and one way of appealing is to give your accounts of how things are developing in the event the personal touch. For instance, if you plan on holding a charity run on Clapham Common, appealing to the residents of that area should gain you some Brownie points. When you are familiar with an area you can talk about focal points around the neighbourhood such as the clock tower or the pond on the south side of the common. People feel a sense of ownership when they see their neighbourhood mentioned in such a public forum and this often means that they are willing to support that event in person if not with money.
Face book isn’t the only online, public forum where you can bring your events to the notice of a much wider audience. Twitter is becoming a hub that even local police forces take advantage of. Once you have signed up for an account it won’t be long before you attract hundreds, if not thousands of followers.
Tweet it on Twitter
One of the beauties, and also the drawbacks of twitter is that you have to tweet everything in a hundred and forty characters or less, which means you have to think very carefully about the content and purpose of your tweet. One of the ways that people get around the restriction on individual tweets is to set up a sequence of tweets. If you are holding a jumble sale in your local church hall or setting up a fun run at the local common you can use one tweet about the event, another about the location of the charity event and a third asking for sponsors and helpers. Just a few things that you can do to help attract sponsors when you are raising money for charity.

This post was written by Crispin Jones on behalf of The Poppy Run who organise a charity event fun run every year. Photo: John Antoni