Service Fundraisers
Santa's Helpers Child-care Service
You can help eliminate holiday stress and motivate giving by organizing a Santa's Helper program either within your church or in volunteers' homes. Parents may drop off their children at the designated place and go Christmas shopping or attend parties. In larger churches, this may be most effective as an eight-hour-a-day service. Provide a schedule for parents (distributed as a flyer in the church bulletin) of who is offering Santa Helper duty and when and where they're offering it. Provide a contact number for parents to call to sign up and register for a fee. It is up to volunteers to determine how many children they can keep, how long, and how many times. You may wish to provide Christmas videos or other holiday activities to help volunteers entertain children during the time their parents are gone.
Car Wash with a Difference
Plan to advertise a free car wash in your community. Get someone with desktop publishing to help design a flyer. At the bottom of the flyer, put a coupon for a free car wash, and give the name of your youth group, along with date, location and time. Use the rest of the page to make squares for advertisers. Adults (or youth with adults) can canvas local business to find people who will donate money ($100 or $200, depending on the size of the square) for advertising space on the flyer. Let them know how many homes in the area you plan to cover with the flyers. Ask a local printer to print copies at a reduced rate in return for space on the flyer. Businesses consider it a good deal to get free advertising and be seen as helping a good cause. Whether or not people show up for the car wash, your group makes money!
Free Car Wash
You charge nothing! Your kids collect sponsors for every car washed. If each kid collects $1 per car in sponsors and you have 30 kids, you make $30 per car! Our least successful Free Car Wash raised $2400. Guarantee that you will not wash any more than 60 cars. You can also add an outreach element to this by giving every driver a flyer describing your church services and programs.
Personalized Labels
If you have computer capabilities, offer to sell 100 personalized return labels for $5. You could also do business cards.
Valentine's Flowers to Go
Take orders from men (and some women) at offices, body shops, health clubs, bowling alleys, and your church for 6 long stem red and white carnations and a box of candy. Package the flowers with greens and ribbon, (purchased in bulk from a local greenhouse) in a clear plastic container, and delivered them on Valentine's Day for a cost of about $15 - $20. With 10 teens and 10 orders each you could gross $1,500 - $2,000 less expenses (about half).
Christmas Tree Sales
Cut and deliver or sell in a parking lot.
Christmas Presents
Set up a booth at a local mall to wrap presents for Christmas shoppers.
Sponsor Program
For camps, youth conventions and missions trips have adults sponsor teens so they can experience some of these spiritual events. Have a sponsor banquet after the trip with slides/video and teens sharing what they learned. Everyone wins. |
