Advising Center

These days everything and everybody seems to be all about “Going Green.” Why not fund raising? This article will show you how going green is a great fundraiser that will bring in some money and help out the environment too!

Whatever your organization–school, library, non-profit, hospital–this fund raising idea will work for you. It involves selling advertising placements on a reusable shopping bag. Here’s the basic idea behind this fund raising idea:

It’s really a quite simple concept, which can be implemented in any organization. Sell ad placements on an eco friendly shopping bag. The best types of bags for this will be any kind of reusable bag. Check to make sure it is an eco friendly material like cotton canvas. This fundraiser is especially suited for schools because the students do all of the ad sales. It’s easy to split up the imprinting area on the bags into multiple ad spaces, and divide the cost of the bag production by the number of advertising spaces, and increase the cost of the placement according to the amount of money the organization would like to profit.

Businesses love to be seen as being involved in the community. So, this kind of fundraising is not very difficult to sell. There are many ways to sell the advertising. All the ad sizes could be equal in size, or there could be a premium ad on each side of the bag that would bring in more money. I think it will be more clear in the example to follow.

For the examples purpose, let’s say there is a tote bag that cost 1.65, and the second side imprinting costs $0.42, which is a total of $2.07. Let’s also say that the organization will purchase 1,000 bags for distribution. The total bag costs is about $2,070. You also have to remember shipping and setup charges. For sake of this example, assume that all ad sizes are the same, and there are 8 ads per side; totaling 16 ads. The cost per ad placement to cover the bag price would be $129, but this will not profit the organization. If the ads cost $200, that would profit the organization $1,136. $200 isn’t very much for an ad placement, so, the ads could be $250 or more. If the ads cost $250, the organization would profit $1936. As you can see, this could be a very profitable fundraiser for an organization.

Distribution is another way the organization could help raise even more money. The bags could be sold an events for a small profit. Even if the bags are resold for $1, the organization would be making an additional $1000. Some organizations also feel that the advertisers should be getting the bags to hand out to their customers. These bags could be given away by the advertisers’ storefronts. Either way, advertisers will be getting 1000 “walking billboards” with their ads being shown to countless numbers of people.