Category Archives: Events

Event ideas to raise money

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Sports
Sports fundraising ideas provides a great way for coaches, parents, and schools to raise funds for new equipment, team uniforms, or travel funds for competitions. In addition, sports fundraising teaches children the importance of community service and being part of something larger than themselves. Sports fundraisers can also tie in values such as teamwork, sportsmanship and more.

Football fundraising
Fundraising is a great way for football teams, summer leagues and traveling teams to earn extra money for team uniforms, new equipment, training tools, entry fees and referee fees for traveling teams. Why not organise the event entertainment with a sponsored football kick about or a penalty shoot-out? Don’t forget to buy some medals for the winners.

Dance Team Fundraising
If you are a dance or cheerleading team, consider hosting a dance-a-thon. This type of fundraiser works just like any walk-a-thon, however instead of walking… participants are dancing! Pick a day where dance team members and teachers teach dance lessons to others in the community. Incorporate fun dance performances as well to keep attendees entertained. Bring on a local business to sponsor and give all participants a t-shirt.

Team-Building Events
Another interesting idea for teams with older participants is a “team-building” fundraising event, such as a fundraising treasure hunt or relay race. Teams must delegate about the most efficient route to take, assign team members roles, and work together to accomplish their goals. This could be a great fundraising idea for a debate team or chess team. Funds are raised through team registration fees, plus individual pledge donation requirements.

Bring the community together

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Local events are a great way to bring communities closer together. Whether you want to raise funds for a worthy cause, bring about positive change in your area, celebrate something special or simply get to know your neighbours, a community event will help rally the masses.

Deciding what type of event you should hold will depend on your goals, as well as the size and demographic of your target audience. However, here are 10 tried and trusted ideas for community events that should help get everyone together.

1. Host a street party

Street parties are now being held at any time, for all ages, to build community spirit at the street level. They are a more relaxed affair with attendees asked to bring a dish to share or with a barbecue arranged.

2. Put on a film screening

Who doesn’t enjoy watching a great movie on a big screen with a tub of tasty popcorn? You can organise a film screening at a local school, church, community centre or even outside, under the stars. Choose to screen a recent blockbuster or go for an old classic and embrace a theme, like ‘The Rocky Horror Show’ with guests encouraged to come in fancy dress.

On the other hand, if you have a message to get across or are marking a particular occasion you can choose a relevant movie i.e. ‘The Dam Busters’ to commemorate Remembrance Day or ‘The Fault in Our Stars’ to raise awareness about living with cancer.

But don’t forget, under UK copyright law, if you are playing films outside your domestic or home circle, you will need to obtain a licence to do so (even for free of charge events and fundraisers).

3. Organise a pub quiz

A quiz night with general knowledge questions can appeal to a broad audience, or you can target particular groups by focusing on specialist subjects, such as football or music. Theming your quiz can also give it an extra edge; for example, how about holding one on Halloween with questions about horror films, along with spooky decorations to get everyone in the spirit!

The hardest part of holding a quiz night is inevitably writing the questions. If you research your own trivia on the internet, then be careful how you select the sites you choose to get the questions from. Do not just crib from the first list of horror movie facts you come across – your participants may well have been on the same website!

4. Gather a gardening gang

If there’s a green space in your community that has seen better days, why not organise a group of volunteers to restore it to its former glory? Digging out weeds, picking litter and planting flowers will transform it into something for all to enjoy and encourage people to take an active part in caring for their local area.

Or perhaps your child’s school has an area of unused playing field that could be put to better use? Approach the PTA about turning it into a vegetable patch with the help of parents and pupils, growing produce for school dinners while teaching the children about where food comes from.

5. Hold a swap shop

Holding a swapping event can have both social and environmental benefits for your community. Not only does it minimise the number of unwanted items going to landfill, it also helps those in need – according to official statistics, there are 4 million children in the UK living in households that cannot afford to replace worn out or broken furniture and electrical items.

A swap shop is a cashless local event where people exchange unwanted items for something they do want. Not everyone needs to bring something – the more takers the better it will mean you will have very little left over at the end.

You may choose to have an event at a specific venue or simply a day when everyone puts their unwanted items out on the street and anyone can take what they want.

Just remember to notify the local council first and arrange for the anything not claimed to be taken to a local charity shop or furniture reuse organisation afterwards.

6. Organise an arts & crafts festival

In every community there are budding artists and craft enthusiasts that you could bring together by creating your own arts & crafts festival.

The term arts & crafts covers such a magnitude of different disciplines, that there really isn’t anything stopping you setting up stalls selling anything you want; from pottery to water colours, knitted wear to jewellery, there’ll be something for everyone to buy.

7. Use a themed day

There are a multitude of different themed days you could utilise; you only need to look at the internet to see how many “National’ days are out there.

A firm favourite, which will also help your local library, is World Book Day. The best way to get the community involved is by getting everyone to dress as their favourite character from any book they choose. This could mean dressing as Where’s Wally, The Cat in the Hat, Mr Darcy even! The possibilities are endless!

Invite local authors, or even famous authors who have ties to your community. You can organise a selection of readings with an open-mic night, and why not organise a poetry competition and get a local bookshop to donate prizes?

8. Organise a performance

Amateur dramatics has been a long standing part of the community, so why not gather some aspiring thespians together and organise a show?

This doesn’t have to be on a stage in the community hall, why not change things up and create a walking performance? Get the audience to follow a set course around town, where they can watch parts of the play in certain areas. Have your actors do scenes or interact with the audience in-between stops, making them part of the performance.

Use the seasons to your advantage to entice people to see your performance. Everyone loves getting into the Christmas Spirit around December, so why not perform ‘A Christmas Carol’? Or you could make use of a nearby forest or gardens to perform ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ when the summer months are here.

9. Food Festival/Farmer’s Market

Who can say no to delicious food? Especially when the town is filled with the most amazing smells!

Whether you get some local farmers, caterers or local food shops together, this is a great way to highlight the local produce and local sellers in the area. As well as getting to eat all the delicious food at the event, people will know they will be able to buy this produce locally on any other given day.

Why not think Great British Bake Off and ask the community to create their own showstopper cakes and raffle them off. No one can turn down cake, especially if you have a tea stand nearby!

10. Fireworks / Bonfire Night

Fireworks always brings in the crowds. There is something about lighting up the sky that just amazes people. Add a bonfire to the equation and you have a perfect winter event. Serve hearty food like jacket potatoes, with a hot chocolate (maybe a Baileys hot chocolate for the adults) and you’ll keep the crown fed, watered, and more importantly, warm!

You may be limited to using fireworks to certain nights of the year like Guy Fawkes Night and New Year’s Eve, but there isn’t anything stopping you having your own bonfire night with all the added activities to go with it, like lighting sparklers and toasted marshmallows.

Threats to the event industry

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The rest of 2016 and 2017 are set to be quite disruptive. Technology and political changes will shake up the event industry as we know it. Are you ready to embrace the change? There is a lot going on in the world. The last 6 months have been quite dramatic, scary and exciting at the same time. It seems we are going through one of those cycles of intense change that happen every 10 years.

There are two main areas of disruption: Security and Technology. The way we react to these profound changes is going to define our profession for the next 10 years.

Security and Terrorism

There is a very volatile situation involving security and terrorism related threats. Looking at the facts of what has happened and is currently happening in Europe, U.S. and Africa, events are increasingly exposed to such threat.

Going over what has happened and revisit the facts is too painful. One thing for sure. We know several events have been targeted. Lives have been taken away. Security at events is under scrutiny. It seems that most of these attacks want to strike wherever there is a gathering of people having fun, learning or simply enjoying life.

Technology

While we were growing tired of using hashtags on Twitter, a disruptive change happened on major social networks that impacts on the event industry.

Only three weeks ago, the Pokémon Go frenzy started. All of sudden hundreds of thousands of players are using augmented reality to play a game outside in the real world. What we tried to do for years in events (live streaming and augmented reality gaming) is happening in the most mainstream way we have ever seen.

So What’s the Biggest Threat?

The biggest threat at the moment for our industry, our event company, our job is how we react to these changes. If you think we are talking about a stupid game, you are not getting it. That’s a threat to how you do business.

If you think that the terrorist threats are a distant problem, you are not getting it. You are endangering the lives of your attendees.

We don’t believe there is such thing as ‘hype’ anymore. Probably 15 years ago, we could have talked about hype but social media proved that hype is no more. There is no time to think whether a new tool is hype or not. We just need to embrace the change and understand what is happening.

BE CAREFUL.

We are not saying you should start playing 90s retro games or lock down your event altogether because you read it in the news. What we are proposing here is that we get deep into understanding what is happening around us.

Smart event professionals look into the recent terror events and understand what they can do to protect their event going forward. They start a conversation with local authorities to have a clear image of potential threats. They invest in extra security if they have established that there could be problems with their event.

No Excuses, Keep Up

Change is around us and recently is happening faster than we’ve ever experienced. Developments are faster and we need to keep up. No excuse. If you want to be a good event professional, you need to keep up. Get the facts, read, think, strategize, protect your attendees, understand your attendees. Think how they are changing. Your attendees will thank you for that.