Fundraising
Now that you’ve decided that the Ultimate Life Summit is for you, you have to go about figuring out how to make it happen. If fundraising is an issue, we have some great ideas for you.
Possibly the easiest tool to use is ChipIn.com. It’s a great site that lets you raise money online from friends and family all over the world. It’s free, and all you need to use it is a PayPal account. Once you’ve set up your account on ChipIn.com you will be able to send a link to anyone and everyone you know. That’s the easiest way, but you can also create widgets for MySpace, Xanga, and even Facebook if you’d like. You can set the amount you are trying to raise and the deadline for raising it. It also has a tracking feature which lets you and your friends see exactly how much progress you’ve made. The money goes directly into your PayPal account.
You can also apply for a Magic Wand Foundation Scholarship by downloading an application from our site here.
On the local level there are other things you can do such as try and get sponsors from neighborhood businesses. Here are a few suggestions:
Approach a local retailer. Ask them about a slow moving product or one of which they have too many in inventory. Ask them to donate one or a number of those items to your trip. Or donate it at cost. You then sell raffle tickets for those items and you keep the proceeds from the ticket sales – or whatever is left after fulfilling your obligation to the retailer. Of course the key is to getting the retailer’s support is to make sure that both you and the store benefit. As such you will want to let people know where the item is coming from and maybe encourage them to go by the store as well.
You can do something similar at a local restaurant. Go to the owner and ask about the slowest day of the week. Ask him or her to designate that day as a day dedicated to you or your group, with you earning some amount of money from the revenue generated by the customers you drive into the restaurant on that night. Then you go out and publicize your night at the restaurant to all of your friends and family members. And ask them to do the same. You then volunteer to greet people at the door that night so you can keep an accurate account of the people who came in as a result of your efforts.
If you are finding it difficult to raise the funding on your own, maybe you should try a group. Obviously the place to start is getting a couple of your friends to attend the Ultimate Life Summit with you. That way, by working together there may be opportunities that are better suited for group fundraising rather than individual. A car wash would be an example. Weekly bake sales another.
Here are some links to different sources of fundraising ideas, many of which are for groups, although there are numerous individual fundraising ideas:
www.fundraiserhelp.com
www.fundraiserinsight.org/ideas/
www.bestfundraisers.org/
Here’s a link to another a site where many people have posted fund raising ideas that have worked for them:
www.fundraising-ideas.org/DIY/index.html