The Significance of Fundraising for Small Businesses
Your small business can make a huge difference. When it comes to charity fundraising, it isn’t about the size of your business. It’s about the scale of your ambition and the level of your commitment to your chosen charity. Small businesses up and down the country raise significant amounts of money for good causes every day. Every penny raised can help charities in their valuable work.
Whether you regularly run fundraising events, are planning one for the first time or are looking for ways to raise money online for a good cause, here we’ll explore your options and explain how you can make the most of your fundraising efforts.
Demystifying Fundraising for Small Businesses
Fundraising isn’t just for big businesses. Yes, larger scale corporations may have the resources to put on large-scale fundraising events, but it doesn’t mean you can’t do your bit. Often small business fundraising will focus on smaller events in the local community.
You can help charities that play an active role in your area or raise money for local schools or sports clubs. And by doing so, you’ll be able to see the results of your efforts to the people around you.
What’s more, it doesn’t require a big budget. You can simply look at donation roundups when you ask customers to round up their spend to donate to charity. Or you can run matched giving days, skills workshops or smaller scale fundraising events. With a little creative thinking, you can really do your bit for charity.
The Perks of Small Business Fundraising
There are a range of benefits charity fundraising brings to your small business. They include:
- Boosting morale across your organisation
- Creating goodwill with the local community
- Enhancing the reputation of your business
- Building camaraderie among employees
- Retaining and attracting good employees
- Networking with organisations, companies and people in your local area
- Driving customer loyalty
Amplifying Business Reputation Through Fundraising
When you run a charitable event, volunteer at community clean ups or support other charitable activities in your community, it doesn’t go unnoticed.
First and foremost, having your name attached to a cause or event builds brand recognition. People also like to support businesses that help others and the community. By running fundraising events and activities and making charitable donations, you can boost your business and increase customer loyalty. Put simply, people like to buy from businesses that do good in the world.
Your reputation as a good business also goes beyond your customer base. When it comes to hiring and retaining employees, it really helps. People want to be associated with a company that’s striving to make a difference in the world. Plus, if people are given an opportunity to raise funds themselves, take time out of their work to give back to a charity or get involved in company fundraising events, it enhances their working lives. This in turn can boost the happiness and motivation of your employees.
Your promotion around your fundraising activities is key. Whether engaging with local media or promoting on social media, you’ll want to get the message out as much as possible about your fundraising efforts. To boost your potential funds, and also to enhance your reputation.
Realising Fundraising in Small Businesses
So, how do you make it happen? Here are a few tips to get you started.
Selecting the Right Fundraising Strategy
When it comes to choosing the right fundraising strategy, you’ll need to define the goals of your fundraising campaign.
First, decide which charity you want to support. Do you want to raise money for a good cause in your community? Is it about raising funds for disaster relief? Or do you want to boost the coffers of your local sports club? You may want to support more than one charity or just focus your attentions on one. It’s up to you.
Once you know who you’re going to support, consider your fundraising goal. How much do you want to raise in total, and across what timeframe? Remember to use the SMART principle when it comes to your fundraising goal. It should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound.
Then you’ll need to think about your fundraising tactics. The resources, budget and time available will play a factor in this too.
For example, if you’re a very small business without the means to put on a fundraising event, you may want to keep your fundraising digital. You can use digital methods like crowdfunding or easyfundraising to secure ongoing donations. You’ll just need to spend some time getting your campaign set up, work on your messaging and continue to promote it on social media. If you have a little more resource but not the biggest budget in the world for an in-person event, you could consider an online event such as a charity auction.
If your goal is to really engage with the people in your local area as well as raise money, community fundraising events are ideal. This could be skills workshops, car washes, charity bake sales, quiz nights or black tie balls.
Your strategy must always come down to your fundraising goal and the resources you have available. Try to keep it achievable and remember that even the smallest events or fundraising drives can go a long way for your chosen charity.
Orchestrating a Fundraising Event
If you’re putting on a fundraising event, the success hinges on proper planning and coordination. Here’s what you need to do:
- Select your fundraising goal. Who are you supporting? And how much do you want to raise?
- Assemble your fundraising team. You want people with some creativity, people who can plan and people who are good with money. Try and assemble a core team and build a small fundraising committee from across your organisation.
- Choose the right event. Your goals, budget and resources will all play into this. You could keep it small with a community car wash or bake sale, or go big with a black tie ball.
- Create a budget. What budget can the business afford to give to put the event on in the first place? You’ll need to list out all your event requirements and assign a cost to each. Then you’ll need to estimate the scale of the funds you can potentially raise through your ticket sales, tombola, refreshments and any other fundraising activities at the event.
- Promote your event. You need to get people buying tickets and people through the door of your event. Social media promotion is key, as are traditional tactics like flyers and posters around the local community.
- Host your event. When it’s time for the event, planning is essential. You’ll need to brief everyone on their roles, and it always makes sense to have a run-through to ensure everyone knows what they need to do. If you’re using any technology at the event, make sure you’ve checked it’s working and the people operating it know exactly what they’re doing to avoid any hiccups.
- Engage attendees. As soon as people come through your doors, you’ll need to engage with them. Are you looking for more donations during the event? Do you want them to buy raffle tickets or just spend some cash on refreshments? Greet them, make them feel welcome and ensure they know what’s going on and how they can part with their cash.
- Thank participants and donors. When people donate at the event, be sure to thank them. And for any big donations from customers or suppliers. for example, you can shout about this on social media, in your emails and thank them personally.
- Evaluate your event. Look at how you did against your fundraising goals. Did you hit your target? Did you overspend on your budget? Being analytical at this stage will help you with your planning for your next event.
The Role of easyfundraising in Small Business Fundraising
At easyfundraising, we give you a simple way to help boost your fundraising efforts when you buy any of your business supplies and essentials online.
All you need to do is sign up and register your business with us. It’s a simple process and takes minutes. Once you do, you can shop online with more than 7,500 online retailers via easyfundraising. And every time you spend with one of these retailers, they will donate a portion of your spend to a good cause at no extra cost to you.
You can select your cause from the 190,000+ we already work with. It’s a fantastic way to boost your ongoing fundraising efforts, and you’ll be surprised how much money you can raise simply by buying the same things with the same suppliers at the same price.
Leveraging easyfundraising to Maximise Fundraising
To make the most of easyfundraising, make sure anyone who buys online for your business has access to your business account and uses it each time they make a purchase. You can also encourage your employees to sign up for personal easyfundraising accounts and to pick your chosen charity when they shop online.
You can run competitions for the staff that raise the most for your chosen charity, with leaderboards and prizes for the biggest fundraisers like an extra day off or other perks.
Integrating Social Responsibility into Fundraising
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is the efforts your business makes towards improving society and contributing towards a better world. It’s a self-regulating model where you hold yourself accountable to yourself, your stakeholders and the general public. With CSR, you take responsibility for the impact your business makes on a range of issues from human rights to the environment.
One of the key aspects of CSR is philanthropic CSR which can involve charity fundraising. Of course, it makes sense to integrate your CSR activities with your fundraising, but only if it’s done well.
Merging Fundraising with Corporate Social Responsibility
Your CSR activities need to align with your business values and the way you operate your organisation. What good are you trying to do in the world? CSR can’t be a token gesture and you need to be able to hold your business accountable.
Before you decide which charities to support, look at your business values. Are you all about the people in your organisation and making their lives better? Ask yourself, how can you then make the lives of the people in your local community better through your charity fundraising? Are you trying to become a greener business with the way you run day to day and across your supply chain? Can you then give to environmental charities or support environmental initiatives in your local area through your charity fundraising?
For effective CSR, charity fundraising without a business commitment doesn’t work. For example, if you’re supporting an environmental charity without putting in the hard work to change how you run as a business. Or if you’re raising money to help people in your local community, but you’re not looking after the people in your company properly.
For CSR and charity fundraising to effectively coexist, your business has to walk the walk every day too.
The Fundraising Journey Awaits
Remember, businesses of any size can fundraise for charity. Just because your business is small it doesn’t mean you can’t make a big impact. With the right goals and objectives, well-planned fundraising events and a way to secure ongoing online donations, your fundraising initiatives can be hugely successful.