Miscellaneous Money Raising

Letter from Santa

Here is another one from the Internet-- I am a Police Officer, in charge of a Police and Citizens' Youth Club in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. The club is a registered charitable organisation and must raise all of its' own fund, with the exception of my wages which are paid by the WA Police Service. Each year, in November, we conduct a "LETTER FROM SANTA CAMPAIGN". Children are asked to send their letters to the PCYC for passing onto Santa. If they would like a reply and a small gift they enclose $5.00. Each participant receives a personal letter from Father Christmas, a Badge, and Small gift. A nice paper with an appropriate Christmas theme is used and some of the children's' queries are answered. This is very quick to do if you draft a form letter and only personalise one or two paragraphs. We make from between 2 and 3 dollars per letter, raising over $500.00 last year.

Coin Drops

The basic idea is to put some sort of receptacle in a prominent place and watch the money grow. There are variations on this idea

• Candy Machine-You can have a real machine or just a box with candy and work on the honor system.
  
• Foreign Coin Collection-Collect those foreign coins that you accidentally brought back from your vacation. Take them to a bank that will process them and give you the equivalent in your home country's cash.
  
• Coin Drop Competition-This works well if you have two groups in the same place raising money for the same thing and a currency that has two colors. Have a clear coin drop for each group. One color type counts a positive and one as negative. Thus the competitors are encouraged to put one color in their own drop and the other color in the competitor's drop. Funds accumulate twice as fast.

Adopt-a-Book Luncheon

Here is another good one from AWC Stockholm, AWC Sweden's annual Adopt-A-Book Luncheon is held at the residence of the U.S. Ambassador. Women attending contribute in two ways: first, by buying a ticket to the luncheon, which in itself is a fund-raiser, with the bulk of the money being used to purchase books chosen in cooperation with local school librarians. Secondly, each woman may purchase (or "adopt") a book from a wide range of pre-selected American authors. The books are then donated to English-speaking schools in the greater Stockholm area as a way of exposing students to excellence in American writing. The luncheon was created by AWC in response to the under-funding of Swedish school libraries and the lack of books in English in these libraries.