Have fun with these ideas for profitable, one-of-a-kind fundraisers. Each one can be customized to suit your group’s size, budget and personality.
Teams of four or five pay to enter and get a list of photo challenges at the starting line. Recreate a famous album cover. Fit the whole team into one shopping cart. Find a stranger willing to wear your team’s hat. Every photo earns points, and the funniest ones earn extra.
Give teams about two hours and keep the hunt to a walkable area like your downtown. Everyone sends their photos to a shared album as they go. Finish at a pizza place or your school gym for a slideshow of the best shots.
Local shops will often pay a small sponsorship to be a stop on the list, since it sends a parade of people through their door.
This is one is actually a beloved annual tradition for some organizations. Teams build a boat using only cardboard and duct tape, then paddle it across a pool or a calm pond. Plenty of boats sink within sight of the start, and those get the loudest cheers. Give prizes for the fastest crossing and the most spectacular sinking.
Charge an entry fee per team and sell tickets to spectators. Put every paddler in a life jacket and have a lifeguard on duty. Ask your public pool about hosting on the last weekend of the season.
Designers build an outfit from materials headed for the garbage or recycling bin. Think newspaper skirts and a cape made of chip bags. Each designer or team pays to enter, then models the result on a runway.
Start collecting about a month ahead. Put out a labeled bin and ask supporters for clean, dry castoffs like these:
Tape, glue, staples and thread are fair game for holding it all together.
A short set of rules keeps the show fun for everyone:
Sell tickets to the show and let the audience vote for a favorite with spare dollars. Ideal for art classes and youth groups.
Guests buy a ticket and spend an evening building a wreath for their own front door. Each seat gets a wire frame, a spool of florist wire and a pile of greenery to work with. Someone handy leads the group through the basics, and no two wreaths come out alike.
Evergreens make this a natural for early December. It works just as well in spring with eucalyptus and dried flowers, or in fall with leaves and mini pumpkins. Ask a tree lot or a local garden club for trimmings, since donated greenery is where most of your profit comes from. Hot cider and cookies on the side turn it into a night out.
Families buy a lantern kit at the door and settle in at the craft tables. Each kit holds a paper lantern, a carrying stick and a battery tea light, so there are no open flames to worry about. Tissue paper, markers and stickers do the rest.
When the sun goes down, everyone lines up and walks a short loop together around the school grounds or a nearby park. A long line of glowing lanterns in the dark is nothing short of magical. Keep the route to about fifteen minutes and post a volunteer with a flashlight at each turn.
End at a hot chocolate stand, where donations for the cocoa and cookies bring in a little more for your cause. Check the sunset time when you set your date. Any time of year works, but late fall and winter give you darkness earlier if you want to include small children.
Buy flowers by the bunch from a wholesaler or local grower or florist (or better yet, see if you can secure some donations), then sort the stems into buckets by type. Guests choose their own stems and pay by the bouquet. A volunteer wraps each one in brown paper and twine.
The bar draws a crowd the weekend of Mother’s Day and fits nicely beside a bake sale or a school concert.
Families place an order ahead of Easter, and your volunteers hide filled eggs on their lawn the night before. The kids wake up to an egg hunt right outside the front door. Parents get to skip the late-night stuffing and hiding!
Offer two or three package sizes by egg count and take orders online with a cutoff about a week ahead. Hold an egg-stuffing party a few days prior, then send out teams of two with a route list after dark. Set a delivery area you can cover in one evening, and offer a candy-free option with stickers and small toys.
Invite home cooks and local chefs to demonstrate a dish that means something to their family. Guests buy a ticket, watch each dish come together and taste the results. Collect the recipes into a printed booklet to sell on the night.
A lineup of cooks from different backgrounds makes for a delicious evening. Check the venue’s kitchen and food safety rules when you book.
Ask supporters to donate old and broken jewelry, like single earrings and snapped necklaces. Run a workshop where participants pay to take the pieces apart and turn them into something new, with a local jewelry maker guiding the group.
Ask the maker to create a few showpieces from the donations for a silent auction.
Local potters or school art classes donate handmade bowls, and guests have the opportunity to purchase one to take home.
Build the dinner around a "bowl" theme. Serve a menu of dishes that belong in a bowl, like soups, chili, ramen, grain bowls, or big salads, with an ice cream sundae bar to finish.
Give your potters two or three months of notice, and ask a restaurant or two to donate food or gather some volunteer cooks if you have access to a commercial kitchen.
Bring back that 90s coffee house beatnik vibe.
Sell tickets at the door and let poets perform their own work for a live audience. Borrow a coffee shop space for the evening (a cafe owner might welcome a full house on a slow weeknight, so you might be able to use the space for free) or set one up and staff it with volunteers. Add a youth round early in the night so students can perform.
Invite supporters to design your group’s next t-shirt. Charge a small fee per entry, then display the designs online or at an event and let the community vote. The winning artist gets the first shirt off the press.
Take pre-orders for the winning design so you only print what you’ve sold.
Every gardener has more hostas than they know what to do with. Ask them to dig up their extras, pot them and add a label with the plant’s name and how much sun it likes. Houseplant fans can bring rooted cuttings in jars.
On the day, swappers pay a small entry fee to trade plant for plant. Others can shop the sale tables, where donated plants go for far less than garden center prices. See if a local nursery or garden club can chip in a few flats to fill things out.
Also add a potting station for kids. For a few dollars they decorate a small terracotta pot with paint markers and plant a seedling in it to take home. Hold the event in mid-spring, once the frosts are over and people are itching to get into the garden.
Mark out a grid of squares on a parking lot or a closed-off stretch of sidewalk. Businesses and families sponsor a square ahead of the day, then fill it with their own chalk art or can hand it over to a local artist. Add the sponsor's and artist's names on a small sign beside each square.
Buy chalk in bulk and get the property owner’s permission in writing. Pick a rain date when you announce the event. Visitors can vote for a favorite square with spare dollars.
Every act performs a song from the year the performer was born. A grandfather’s crooner ballad might follow a teenager’s pop hit. Have the MC ask the audience to guess each year, then reveal it.
Sell tickets, add a snack table and charge a small entry fee per act.
Parents get a date night, and the kids get a room full of LEGO. Families buy a ticket per child for a supervised evening at school, with pizza and a few hours of building. Ask a local restaurant to sponsor the food in return for a mention to all those parents heading out to dinner.
Divide the students into teams based on the LEGO colors. They can wear T-shirts or bandannas to represent their team color. Run a series of building challenges and award prizes for speed, creativity and teamwork.
Ask every family to send in a bag of unloved LEGO along with their child. Those bricks fuel the evening, and afterward you can sell them in bulk online, where used LEGO goes by the pound. Keep a sign-in sheet at the door and plenty of adult helpers in the room, so parents can enjoy their night out knowing the kids are safe and having a great evening, too.
A one-of-a-kind fundraising event starts at the planning stage. It can be tempting, in our rushed and sometimes crazy lives, to simply repeat an event that was successful in the past. Give your committee permission to do things differently this time, starting with:
Planning these events can be exciting and a whole lot of fun, too.
Happy fundraising!