In 2007, I did what most people tell you NEVER to do. I quit my day job. I was now officially a full-time Comedian and MC.
After the birth of my daughter, I decided to start up a little comedy show for Mums in a local tennis club for a bit of fun. The idea being, new Mums could feed their baby, leave them with Dad, come out for a laugh and be back at home in an hour. The baby (and more importantly, Dad!) would hardly know you left, but Mums would get the chance to have a good laugh and go home feeling so much better! It was sort of like a Mothers Group, but cups of tea and nursery rhymes were replaced with wine and comedy!
After one of these shows, I had two women run up to me and ask “Do you do fundraisers? This show would be perfect for our School”. And I’m like “Sure we do!” (Even though I had never actually done a fundraiser before!) But I was reminded of that time in Kerang when they raised $3,000 for the Toy Library; surely we could do it again! So I quickly designed a fundraising package and sent out a brochure, and that was the start of my comedy fundraising business – where I would take a mobile comedy club out to schools and sporting clubs and put on a comedy show. They’d sell the tickets, we’d do the Comedy, we’d run a few fundraising games, they’d raise heaps of money, and everyone had a fun night out.
It was all good!
Except when it wasn’t.
You see fundraising events have one problem.
If no one buys tickets, you don’t have a fundraiser.
Most of the time, the organisers would sell all the tickets, have a great show, and it’d be a raging success. But occasionally, the organisers couldn’t sell enough tickets, and we had to cancel the show. It would get quite frustrating, as cancelling an event sucked. Everyone had high expectations and then it didn’t work.
So I started paying attention to what was working with the successful groups, and what wasn’t working for the unsuccessful groups. I took a heap of notes and discovered there were certain things the organisers of the successful events were doing, that the unsuccessful event organisers weren’t doing. Based on what the successful hosts were doing, I created an “8-Week Promo Plan”, and the “Secret to Selling Tickets” guide. This helped the organisers promote and sell tickets to their events, and suddenly cancelling shows became a thing of the past.
But I didn’t stop there. I continued to take note of what made a really successful fundraising event. Like how come some hosts were having a great time at the event and some hosts were utterly exhausted? Why did some hosts have loads of donated prizes and others had hardly any? And why were some hosts surrounded by an active group of happy helpers and others had to do most of the work on their own? I even worked out some cool fundraising hacks like how to easily make an extra $400 from your raffle prizes.
At every event fundraiser I was involved with, I continued to improve and refine my notes. Eventually, I could help every single one of my Comedy Show Hosts run a successful event, and everything pretty much ran like clockwork – every time!
I also became known as the go-to person for fundraisers in my circle of friends, and I was always getting asked to help with their events. It didn’t matter if it was a Comedy Show, a Quiz Night, a Ladies’ Day, or a Gala Dinner; what I soon realised is, that running any type of fundraising event follows a predictable pattern. I know certain things need to be done in a particular order for things to run smoothly. There are specific jobs that you will need help with. There are some fundraising games and activities that you can run at an event that will raise a whole lot of money without much effort, while some will not be worth doing.
I realised I had gathered a lot of helpful information in my head on how to run an event fundraiser easily. I realised I needed to share this information with all the amazing people out there who make a difference by taking it upon themselves to run fundraisers.
I had information that would help make their lives easier. And maybe with my experience, they might be able to raise even more funds the first time they ran an event than they would by themselves.
That’s why I documented everything I’ve learnt about how to run a fundraising event; I developed a system for success and started this website HIT YOUR TARGET FUNDRAISING.
It makes me very happy to say that people are now regularly fundraising $5,000 in one night off this program. How cool is that!?!
So thank you for checking out this website; take a look around and if you think this info can help you, may I suggest getting a copy of my book or signing up for the Hit Your Target E-Course and I wish you all the best for your fundraising success!
