• Fundraising
• How charities use your money
• Who regulates fundraising?
• How to make a complaint
• General vs. specific appeals
• Membership and sponsorship schemes
• Fundraising FAQs
• Fundraising factsheets
  • Mailings addressed to you
  • Unaddressed mail
  • Telephone fundraising
  • Street fundraising
  • Doorstep fundraising
  • Advertising in newspapers and magazines
  • TV and radio advertising
  • Raffles and lotteries
  • Fundraising events
  • Internet fundraising
  • Mail order trading
  • Leaving a gift in your Will
  • Gifts in memory
• Fundraising costs
• Fundraising case studies

From a charity’s perspective events fundraising can be a very effective way to reach out to new audiences and raise awareness.

From a donor’s perspective they can be a lot of fun to take part in, but they also give us the chance to demonstrate, often very publicly, support for a particular charity.

The costs involved in mounting fundraising events vary widely according to the type of event, the number of participants involved and the level of volunteer involvement.

Some challenge events, where the individual taking part in the event takes on the fundraising effort and doesn’t require much support from the charity, can be relatively low cost. Many people now use special web-based schemes (like BmyCharity and JustGiving) to administer their sponsorship, which cuts the cost to the charities further.

For many events, like the London Marathon, the charity will pay a fixed cost for each guaranteed place in the event. Parachute jumps and overseas challenge treks cost the charity more, and they will ask for minimum sponsorship to be paid to cover their costs and ensure that the places they have invested in carry the best possible fundraising return.

Organising a fundraising event for a large number of people, (like a celebrity or gala dinner) can take a great deal of time and effort on the part of the organisation.

Even small events can take months to organise properly, while larger sponsored events can take over a year.

These kind of events tend to be very labour intensive. Charities can also encounter significant risk in embarking on an events programme, because they will often incur all the costs in advance, when the number of participants and the amounts they will donate are far from guaranteed.

As a consequence some events do little more than break even and only a few charities regularly earn a significant amount of income from them.

There are some notable exceptions to this – and that, in any case, many charities conclude that on balance events should still be part of their mix of fundraising techniques as they attract new supporters and generate publicity for the cause.