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Halloween fundraiser ideas

Halloween Fundraising Ideas

Halloween is fast approaching and there is no time like the present to organise a festive fundraiser. Halloween gives the perfect backdrop for any kind of party or event. Why not spice up your spooky get-together and raise some money for charity too.

To get your creative juices flowing, we’ve come up with 5 great fundraiser ideas. Whether it’s in work or just for fun, you could organise a ghostly gathering this Halloween for a good cause.

Halloween
Halloween
  1. Pumpkin Carving Competition

This is something we’re having in our own offices and I cannot wait. My carving skills are next-level and I think I have a great chance of coming in 1st place.

Get your work colleagues together and gather up your pumpkins and have some fun. Donations can come in the form of an entry fee.

  1. Spooky Sponsored Walk

A well-organised run or walk in your local town is a fantastic way to get everyone together and raise as much money as possible. If you have the funds, you can give out medals to those who cross the 5K finish line.

Again, you can ask people to donate a certain amount to enter the race and ask them to raise their own sponsorship funds a week prior to the event.

  1. Dunking for Apples

If you host a Halloween party every year, why not make it exciting and have a ‘Dunking for Apples’ competition this year. You could ask people to donate for every dunk and raise much-needed funds really quickly.

  1. Pumpkin Pie Bake Off

Forget about the Great British Bake-off, this year it’s all about the Pumpkin Pie Bake Off. Get your friends together and have some fun in the kitchen. After you’ve carved your spooky Halloween decoration, you can use the contents to make a tasty (or not so tasty) treat. The winning pie can win a prize!

  1. Bonfire event

This one might be a bit harder and will only work if you have the space and health and safety for it. A festive bonfire event with sparklers and fireworks could be the event-of-the-year. You could ask your local council are they doing anything for the Halloween holidays and suggest they partner up with a local charity to raise some funds while doing so.

InstaGiv

Using the different holidays throughout the year is always a wonderful way to help promote your cause, by launching a fundraising campaign. At InstaGiv, it is around this time of year that all the different holiday friendly keyword requests start to come in, recently we have had some of our clients request new campaign keywords such as; scary, fright, Halloween, ghost, creepy, Santa, merry, Christmas and much more.

Why are they doing this? Well because SMS is the quickest most effective and user-friendly method of collecting donations. It beats standing out in the freezing wintry weather with collection buckets. In addition to that, each donor gets an instant “thank you” response message, this is fully customisable to the charity, allowing you to increase engagement with your donors further by perhaps, inserting a link into the response message or asking them to opt-in to hear more about your cause.

Book a Demo today

To find out more, request a demo or a call-back today. One of our friendly team members will go over everything in more detail with you.

 

Top tips when organising a fundraiser event

Organising an event can be stressful and frustrating, never mind organising a charity event. Not only do you have to think about the basics such as venue and invitations, but you also have to worry about collecting cash.

As the age old saying goes, if you fail to prepare you can prepare to fail. (Sorry for the cliché, but it really is true). To help you prepare and get the most out of your fundraising event, we have come up with our 5 top tips that will help you along the way.

Fundraising event

Top Tips

  1. Draft a budget

A budget is important for any event but even more so with a charity event. You need to ensure you are minimising expenditure and maximising the fundraising.

  1. Ensure you have enough time

Time is everything, and if you try and launch your fundraising event too quickly you will only add to the stress and frustration. Give your self a realistic time frame. An absolute minimum of six months is recommended. In this time, you will be able to take care of sponsorships, vendor bookings and selling tickets.

  1. Pick your venue carefully

Location is everything, and you should look at a few different ones before making up your mind. The location will impact the atmosphere of the event and will add to the overall theme so choose carefully.

  1. Look for sponsorship

The more money you can get from sponsors, the more opportunities you will have. The less money you spend on things such as venue costs, printing, marketing materials, refreshments etc, the more money you will have raised for the charity. Spend wisely and try your very best to get a sponsor on board. Don’t be scared to approach business, they might be more than happy to be involved.

  1. Assess your available resources

Do you have enough resources on hand to execute your event? If you need help, make sure you get it and don’t try to do everything yourself. However, before you start to outsource, make sure you research and budget.

If you follow our top 5 tips, we’re pretty sure you’ll organise the best fundrasing event possible.

You’ve got it!

How can InstaGiv help

Our Event Fundraising tool is used for several types of campaigns among our charity clients. If you have supporters fundraising on your behalf, you can easily issue them with a

unique text code, allowing them to gather donations via SMS for your cause.

Unique codes are typically attached to a keyword and you can generate over 100, 000 codes at no additional cost. Each supporter is given a fundraiser code, attached to a keyword such as GIVE_H7Y5, which acts as a tracking device that captures their fundraising journey directly on the platform.

In real time, you can see who is raising which funds and when. We also have what we call, a totaliser page. This is displayed as a search bar and when a keyword + fundraiser code is entered, the total raised will be displayed.

This is commonly used by charities to give to their corporate partners. Our event fundraising tool is used for some of the UK’s biggest annual fundraising campaigns, such as Macmillan’s Coffee Morning. Each year we issue Macmillan with their keywords and unique codes to add SMS as a donation collection tool for their UK wide campaign.

We can create hundreds of thousands of unique codes, and with our built-in formatting and reporting, there are various elements you can use for tracking and matching records on your end such as adding supporters’ full names and giving each code a custom reference.

Find out for yourself

To see a live demo of our software and how easy it is to use, contact us at any time. A team member will be more than happy to schedule this in at a time that suits you.

A day in the life of InstaGiv

Hi everyone, my name is Caitriona and I’m the Customer Service Manager here at Instagiv. As our blog grows, more and more people are tuning in to hear what we have to say. We thought it’d be fun to show you what exactly happens at Instagiv HQ. We often get questions like ‘What exactly does Instagiv do’ so we thought we’d show you exactly what we do.

What a gorgeous view we have from our offices.

8:30 am

Our office doesn’t open until 9, but I like to get in early and get myself organised with a cup of tea before I sit down to catch up on emails. Our office is situated in a lovely seaside town called Portstewart on the North Coast of Ireland. The area is pretty picturesque and the office is along the promenade. There are a number of gorgeous coffee shops, so if I’m feeling lazy I’ll get a takeout coffee as a treat.

The atmosphere every day at InstaGiv HQ is all things fundraising, engagement, charities, SMS giving, and the list goes on, so we have a lot to get done every day.

Our team are always busy looking after all aspects of the business with the most important focus being customer care.

Arriving at InstaGiv HQ bright and early.

10 am

After I catch up on emails and client queries, we have a team catch up once a week to make sure everyone is on the same page.

The amazing view from our wonderful conference room makes our team meetings so much better. The meetings are normally informal because we have a talented team of people who really work well together. However, when the whiteboard is in use, we know things mean business! That’s me telling the team about all the innovative and exciting up-coming projects that we have planned in the coming months -watch this space.

Some of the InstaGiv team catching up and chatting about new marketing materials.

11:30 am

After a team catch-up, I’ll normally have a few calls scheduled for the rest of the morning. You’ll often find our Customer Service team with their head-sets on training new charities, onboarding clients, carrying out platform demos or holding weekly webinars with our existing clients.

Our team in Customer Service will tell you that that no two days are the same because we treat our clients as individuals and look at their specific needs, goals and requirements and create campaigns to suit their fundraising projects.

1 pm

It’s lunch time. Thankfully, we have a great office with loads of space to enjoy a relaxing lunch time. If I don’t go out for lunch, or take a walk along the beautiful promenade, you’ll find me in our ‘greenhouse’ playing a game of pool or catching up with work friends.

2:30 pm

It was a great idea for management to move our Finance office to the ground floor as I often liaise with our in-house accountant, Angela, with regards to client accounts. We work well as a team and have no issues in getting the job done! We’re in deep discussion here, making our way through our daily to-do list. One is for sure, our clients are never waiting for their out-payments.

Me and Angela chatting all things finance.

4 pm 

We have a development team who work tirelessly developing our platform. Without these guys, we would all well and truly be lost.

Not only did they build our wonderful platforms, but they work every day in continuous improvement, making it better and better each day in meeting the needs of our ever-growing customer base.

I normally have something for them to do, so I’ll go upstairs for a quick catch-up, and normally stay for a quick cup of tea too.

The Instagiv development team

One of our development team working hard on the Instagiv platform.

4:45 pm

Our office closes at 5 pm, so before we lock up for the day I like to do a quick re-cap of what I’ve done and what I need to do tomorrow. Everyday is different here and that’s why I love my job. We have between 200-300 clients to look after every day, so we always have plenty to do.