[makosphere]

I've posted this in a couple of places today because this last weekend we added-up all we raised in the last 6weeks or so and it was over $5K!!! We had no idea whatsoever how to raise the money for our adoption and we got their Adoption Fundraising Ideas book from
NuminousFoundation
They are a nonprofit so there is no scamming, and man there were a ton of ideas and better yet HOW to do them! I hope this will help other people, too, because I am totally impressed. Suze

[melon161]

Can you give us a few of the tips that you've used to get this far?

Thanks,

Stacy

[makosphere]

Sure -- we did a Spaghetti dinner at our local church hall. We had an awesome turnout on fairly short notice (about 3 weeks) and we got people/local shops to donate stuff to auction at the dinner (which was fun, it was like dinner and a show; there's a guy who's really good at this, he has the gift of gab, but really anyone who knows what the item is and can tease and joke folks into bidding will do great at it, plus you could do a silent auction). We're seeing if we can work out a deal to do it again a couple of times at the hall, in return for these later dinners we'd give them part of what we bring in, or they'd have us pay the usual hall usage fee which they waived this first time.

They have a thing in the book about raising $500 in a couple of days, but we raised just under $1K! I think it was like $960 or $970. The book assumes half the donors will decline, but almost everyone gave us something so this went really well!

We did 2 yeard sales so far. We did one that was pretty big, we totally cleaned house, and that went really well, so we went back through the house *again* and we also went to our neighbor -- he's a real packrat, he has a garage full of stuff he's always talking about "gee I should get rid of some"-- he let us scrounge, since he's nice enough to know he'll never do it, LOLOL! So we had furniture and some other large items at the 2nd one, which brought in bigger money.

And I also took some of the best items and sold them on eBay, which made a couple hundred$$. Tho I have to say I learned that I am not the eBay type, I don't care for babysitting it and it cost a lot to do the shipping. If I did it again I'd wait and send them an email after with exact ship-costs because my ship-cost estimates tended to be low; it worked out that the ones that were a bit high balanced it out, but still.

We're definitely going to do all of this again -- but for yard sales it can be dicey in winter here in SE Penna, we're under snow right now, not conducive to that sorta thing, so it will probably have to wait til spring.

The best thing is now we have a lot more confidence. I think we're going to take some of what we made and go to printers to print up flyers we can hand out and other stuff to make people aware. So there you have it, hope this helps! Suze

[Support2Adopt]

Suze,
What a go getter you are! Thanks for sharing. :-)
JJ

[makosphere]

LOL, me, a "go-getter"? I think that's part of why I liked this resource so much, because I am essentially a couch potato at heart, lol. I mean they literally told what kind and how much of the groceries to buy for the dinner, it really was a no-brainer. Not to say I didn't do some legwork, but it was a lot easier than I thought it would be. The yard sales were actually a lot harder because you have to price stuff and then haggle, since that's just the way it's done; I got to where I was feeling like, "just give me anything and take it" at a few points. And actually my DH did a lot of the legwork on the "Raising $500" thing; he got people at church, his work...everyone I know is cheap, lol. Thanks tho! It did make us feel like maybe we can do this thing and not have it take forever. Suze