by Rod_outbak » 07 May 2018, 3:12 pm
Gwion,
A few thoughts:
- Jupiters casino regularly have grants for non-profit organisations. Local gold clubs and I think our local clay-target club have sourced grants from Jupiters, in the past. Note they tend to prefer funding projects that are mult-purpose, so they have often funded community buses for small town club use etc.
- Charity auction, with proceedings going to local gun club revamp. When selling this to the local community, emphasize the history of your club.
Get club members to participate by donating items for sale, seek donations from local businesses, and circulate a detailed list of what will be auctioned. This works best if you can work in with a local event or field day. Last charity auction we held in Ilfracombe, we donated old power-line gear, which included large galvanised eye-bolts, gal pole steps, and other similar gear, and it was snapped up. Old motorbikes, unused small farm equipment, pumps etc etc, all sell well, if you advertise it well enough.
- Get a handle on what professional skills your members have, and what they would be prepared to supply as part of a raffle. [NOTE: This might also be handy to find out what upgrades you could do to your club 'in-house'] Our local football club has an inordinate number of builders on the team, and so one fund-raiser was to offer a building team for a weekend, to the winner.
- If any club members have earthmoving equipment, raffling off a few hours wet hire might be something appealing to local farmers?
- Another successful fund-raiser was to raffle off a team of blokes to work on your garden for a day or a weekend. Half a dozen willing workers for a day or two can make a huge difference to a homestead garden.
- Further to previous, garden ornaments seem to always attract incredible amounts of money, and you'll find someone with decent blacksmithing/fabrication skills, can punch out a few works of garden art for auction. Garden ornamentation and plant holders seem to always sell well.
- One of our neighbours has made some sort of contraption for rolling old barbed wire into various-sized balls, which he makes into garden ornaments. Someone told me the 3ft dia ones sell for over $300!!!
FOR OLD BARBED WIRE!!!
- Local football team has also raised money by shearing cancered/black sheep for local graziers, where they get half the proceeds for the sale of the wool, and supply their efforts for free. Shearers refuse to shear cancered sheep(Usually skin cancers on ears and bums) as there seems to be a fear they might catch cancer from a sheep!
(I wish I was making that up, but I'm pretty sure it's illegal to insist...)
Anyway, there are always a few cancerous sheep that have decent wool on them around, and the grazier usually just wants to get the wool off them to cull them. People have raised money by doing this task around here in years past(I know I did in my teens). It might be worth looking into.
- If you have access to rock like sandstone, you can carve pretty impressive bird-baths with just an angle grinder and diamonds blades. I made a dozen bird-baths like this about 12 years ago, and they dont need to be very large to sell well. Little bowls that can be placed under shrubs in a garden, seem to be popular.
- One final thought is running a coffee van at local events(a lot longer time-frame for raising funds, but potentially good money in it). Expensive to set up and time-consuming, but when I crunch the numbers on what it costs to produce a quality espresso coffee (~$1.20 per 400ml cup), versus what pretty damn mediocre coffee retails for (~$4.50), it's amazing the markup that is considered acceptable!
Again; knowing what skills and resources your members can bring to the table, is where I'd start.
Anyway; a few of my thoughts. Given where you are (Northern Tas), I would think your options for fund-raising would be ten times better than outback QLD.
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Sharing the extreme love with cats in Outback QLD